Brother Ware smiled faintly in decorous response, and bowed in silence; but his wife resented the unctuous beaming of content on the other’s wide countenance, and could not restrain her tongue.
“You seem to bear up tolerably well under this heavy cross, as you call it,” she said sharply.
“The will o’ the Lord, Sister Ware—the will o’ the Lord!” he responded, disposed for the instant to put on his pompous manner with her, and then deciding to smile again as he moved off. The circumstance that he was to get an additional three hundred dollars yearly in his new place was not mentioned between them.
By a mutual impulse the young couple, when they had at last gained the cool open air, crossed the street to the side where overhanging trees shaded the infrequent lamps, and they might be comparatively alone. The wife had taken her husband’s arm, and pressed closely upon it as they walked. For a time no word passed, but finally he said, in a grave voice—
“It is hard upon you, poor girl.”
Then she stopped short, buried her face against his shoulder, and fell to sobbing.
He strove with gentle, whispered remonstrance to win her from this mood, and after a few moments she lifted her head and they resumed their walk, she wiping her eyes as they went.
“I couldn’t keep it in a minute longer!” she said, catching her breath between phrases. “Oh, why do they behave so badly to us, Theron?”
He smiled down momentarily upon her as they moved along, and patted her hand.
“Somebody must have the poor places, Alice,” he said consolingly. “I am a young man yet, remember. We must take our turn, and be patient. For ‘we know that all things work together for good.’ ”
“And your sermon was so head-and-shoulders above all the others!” she went on breathlessly. “Everybody said so! And Mrs. Parshall heard it so direct that you were to be sent here, and I know she told everybody how much I was lotting on it—I wish we could go right off tonight without going to her house—I shall be ashamed to look her in the face—and of course she knows we’re poked off to that miserable Octavius.—Why, Theron, they tell me it’s a worse place even than we’ve got now!”
“Oh, not at all,” he put in reassuringly. “It has grown to be a large town—oh, quite twice the size of Tyre. It’s a great Irish place, I’ve heard. Our own church seems to be a good deal run down there. We must build it up again; and the salary is better—a little.”
But he too was depressed, and they walked on toward their temporary lodging in a silence full of mutual grief. It was not until they had come within sight of this goal that he prefaced by a little sigh of resignation these further words—
“Come—let us make the best of it, my girl! After all, we are in the hands of the Lord.”
“Oh, don’t, Theron!” she said hastily. “Don’t talk to me about the Lord tonight; I can’t bear it!”
II
“Theron! Come out here! This is the funniest thing we have heard yet!”
Mrs. Ware stood on the platform of her new kitchen stoop. The bright flood of May-morning sunshine completely enveloped her girlish form, clad in a simple, fresh-starched calico gown, and shone in golden patches upon her light-brown hair. She had a smile on her face, as she looked down at the milk boy standing on the bottom step—a smile of a doubtful sort, stormily mirthful.
“Come out a minute, Theron!” she called again; and in obedience to the summons the tall lank figure of her husband appeared in the open doorway behind her. A long loose, open dressing-gown dangled to his knees, and his sallow, clean-shaven, thoughtful face wore a morning undress expression of youthful good-nature. He leaned against the doorsill, crossed his large carpet slippers, and looked up into the sky, drawing a long satisfied breath.
“What a beautiful morning!” he exclaimed. “The elms over there are full of robins. We must get up earlier these mornings, and take some walks.”
His wife indicated the boy with the milk-pail on his arm, by a wave of her hand.
“Guess what he tells me!” she said. “It wasn’t a mistake at all, our getting no milk yesterday or the Sunday before. It seems that that’s the custom here, at least so far as the parsonage is concerned.”
“What’s the matter, boy?” asked the young minister, drawling his words a little, and putting a sense of placid irony into them. “Don’t the cows give milk on Sunday, then?”
The boy was not going to be chaffed. “Oh, I’ll bring you milk fast enough on Sundays, if you give me the word,” he said with nonchalance. “Only it won’t last long.”
“How do you mean—‘won’t last long’?” asked Mrs. Ware, briskly.
The boy liked her—both for herself, and for the doughnuts fried with her own hands, which she gave him on his morning round. He dropped his half-defiant tone.
“The thing of it’s this,” he explained. “Every new minister starts in saying we can deliver to this house on Sundays, an’ then gives us notice to stop before the month’s out. It’s the trustees that does it.”
The Rev. Theron Ware uncrossed his feet and moved out on to the stoop beside his wife. “What’s that you say?” he interjected. “Don’t they take milk on Sundays?”
“Nope!” answered the boy.
The young couple looked each other in the face for a puzzled moment, then broke into a laugh.
“Well, we’ll try it, anyway,” said the preacher. “You can go on bringing it Sundays till—till—”
“Till you cave in an’ tell me to stop,” put in the boy. “All right!” and he was off on the instant, the dipper jangling loud incredulity in his pail as he went.
The Wares exchanged another glance as he disappeared round the corner of the house, and another mutual laugh seemed imminent. Then the wife’s face clouded over, and she thrust her underlip a trifle forward out
