Her Husband's Purse

XX

Margaret wondered whether, if Jennie succeeded in warning Daniel of her coming, he would again contrive to prevent Catherine's seeing her.

"Wouldn't it make a good Movie! I might have it copyrighted!" she shrugged.

But she told the chauffeur to hurry, hoping that she might, even yet, get to the office before Daniel got there.

"If I don't, and if he tries to keep Catherine from coming down to me—well, if I didn't look such a sight, I would go right up into the office!"

When, however, the taxicab drew up before the building of which the second floor was occupied by Daniel's law offices, and she leaned for an instant out of the cab window, she saw her husband coming down the street. Jennie, then, had been too early for him. Margaret looked about hastily for Catherine, but she saw nothing of her. She shrank far back, then, in the cab to prevent Daniel's seeing her, for he was now close by.

She saw him hesitate at the door of the building and glance inquiringly at the cab; then, curiosity moving him, for Daniel had the petty curiosity of an unoccupied woman, he came over to the curb and looked into the window of the cab.

Margaret met his glance calmly. All she cared about was that he should not prevent her meeting Catherine.

"Why, Margaret! You out of doors! What for? You came for me? Is anything wrong?"

"I came out for some fresh air."

"But to come out on the street!" he protested, scandalized.

"I'm not exposed to view."

"But the chauffeur has seen you!" whispered Daniel, actually colouring with embarrassment.

"He doesn't mind it nearly as much as you do, Daniel. I think he'll recover; he looks robust."

"But what have you come down to my office for?"

As Margaret at this moment saw Catherine coming out of the building, she promptly answered, "To see Miss Hamilton and clear matters up with her. Here she is now."

Daniel turned about sharply, and Catherine, nodding a cheerful good-morning to him, stepped into the cab and bent over Margaret to kiss her.

"But, Miss Hamilton," cried Daniel as his clerk settled Herself comfortably beside his wife, "why are you not at your desk?"

"I left a note on your desk, Mr. Leitzel, asking you to excuse me for an hour. I shall be back before ten," she replied, drawing the cab door shut and speaking to him through the open window.

"To the park," Margaret ordered the chauffeur. "Good-bye, Daniel."

"Miss Hamilton," faltered Daniel, but before he could collect his wits to decide how he ought to meet so unprecedented a situation, the car started and whirled down the street.

Slowly and thoughtfully he turned into his office building. Never before in all his life had his will been so frustrated as by this young wife of his hearth and home upon whom he showered every comfort, every luxury and indulgence. That any one whom he supported should disobey, defy, and thwart him! It was beyond belief. How did she dare to do it?

"But what's a man to do with a wife who doesn't care for his displeasure any more than if he were an old cat!" he raged. "Oh, well," he tried to console himself, "it won't be long, now, until the baby comes, and then surely she'll be different. She'll have to be! I'll find some means of teaching her that my wishes can't be disregarded!"

Miss Hamilton's note which he found on his desk stated succinctly that she had an imperative engagement this morning which would make her an hour late.

Daniel, sinking limply into his desk-chair, crushed the note in his long, thin fingers and tossed it into his waste-basket, with the murderous wish that it was his clerk's head he was smashing.

"What will they be when they get the vote?" he groaned. "Women," he said spitefully but epigrammatically, "are the pest of men's lives!"

Margaret, meantime, without once directly referring to her husband and his sisters, had managed to convey to Catherine an explanation of the silence and desolation that had existed between them during the past two weeks; and she was now making a compact with her which she felt must insure them both against any future misunderstanding.

"Tell me first, Catherine, that our friendship means more to you than—than any petty considerations! Please, Catherine, tell me that it does! For I just must have you, you know! You are more to me than I can possibly be to you, for you have your mother, while I——"

She hesitated and Catherine said, "And you, Margaret, will soon have your child. Will that make you need me any less? I don't believe it will, dear. And my other dear ones can't in the least fill your place in my life. I can't give you up any more than you can spare me. Nothing," she said with decision, "shall separate us."

"Then," said Margaret, pressing Catherine's hand, "hereafter, when you come to see me, ring the bell four times by twos, and I, knowing about the hour to look for you, will be on hand to let you in myself."

"All right. I will."

"Catherine! You are large-minded!"

"My dear!" protested Catherine, "'large-minded' to be indifferent to the eccentricities of—well," she closed her lips on the rest of her sentence, "two illiterate, vulgar old women," was what she had nearly said; but she left it to Margaret's imagination to finish her remark.

"While you are ill in bed, I suppose I shan't be able to get near you," she ventured. "It will be dreadful if I have to wait nearly a month before I can see that baby! It's going to be awfully dear to me, Margaret! Next thing to having one of my own."

"I couldn't wait a whole month to show it to you. I'll ask the doctor to bring you to me."

"We'll manage somehow," affirmed Catherine.

Margaret, looking rather pale, did not answer, and Catherine suddenly put her arms about her and kissed her.

"You poor child!" she said tenderly.

"I'm not a good fighter," Margaret sadly shook her head. "And there are so many, many adjustments to be made, I——"

She stopped short and bit her lips to keep back the tears that sprang to her eyes.

"At least," said Catherine encouragingly, "you seem to be coming to your ordeal, dear, with plenty of courage; and that's the main thing just now."

"Oh, Catherine, I'm willing to go through a lot for the sake of holding a baby of my own to my heart!"

"Then you think, Margaret, that motherhood is going to be all that it's cracked up to be?"

"Under ideal conditions," said Margaret, "I can see nothing greater to be desired."

"But do the ideal conditions ever exist?"

"I suppose they seldom do."

"Sometimes I've had my doubts," said Catherine. "The male poets and painters exalt the beauty, the holiness of motherhood, and the women bear the burden and pain of it."

"But when women whose lives have had the largest horizon—women like Elizabeth Barrett Browning and Margaret Fuller—have declared that their motherhood was the crown and climax of all their experiences of life, I suppose the poets and painters are not very wrong about it, Catherine."

"I hope they are not, since all my instincts about it are entirely primitive and I feel that nothing in the world will compensate me if I've got to go through life childless."

"There would be one compensation," said Margaret earnestly.

"What?"

"Sometimes, since I've known I was going to have a child, the responsibility, the almost crushing responsibility, has seemed more than I could bear. That's what I meant when I spoke of ideal conditions."

Catherine held back her mental reply to this, which was, "Yes, we should be careful whom we marry, and why did you tie up with a little rat like Danny Leitzel?"

What she did say was: "You didn't feel this crushing sense of responsibility until after you found yourself pregnant?"

"No. Before that I thought only of my own happiness in having a baby to cherish. But, Catherine, when we look about us and see what life can do to us, I wonder how we ever dare, under any conditions, to bring a child into this awful world!"

"We can't question the foundations of the universe, however."

"No, but we can question modern civilization, which produces a huge population of criminals, lunatics, degenerates, and incapables."

"Think of pleasant things, my dear!"

"I try to. To tell you the truth, in spite of my heavy sense of responsibility, I can hardly wait, Catherine, until I have my baby! I want to show you the lovely little embroidered dress Harriet sent me. Will you come in to see it and me this afternoon after four o'clock?"

"Yes."

"I'll be on the watch."

"All right," Catherine nodded.

"The baby received another present, the other day, which touched me very much," added Margaret. "A cunning pair of socks from its grandmother which she knit herself."

"Its grandmother? But——"

"I mean Mr. Leitzel's step-mother."

"Oh!"

"Did you ever happen to see her, Catherine?"

"Once. She came to the office once to see Mr. Leitzel."

Catherine's tone of withdrawal, as though she feared to be questioned, piqued Margaret's interest.

"What was your impression of her?"

"Margaret, your husband's mother has an unforgettable face! There's a benediction in it, such sweetness, refinement, and simplicity shine in her countenance. When she had talked to me for a while, I felt as a good Catholic must who has been blessed by the Pope. Just the sort of person (with a heart too tender to hurt a fly) to be herself easily victimized by the human vultures that prey upon the too confiding."

"Has anybody victimized her?" Margaret casually inquired.

Catherine hesitated an instant before she answered: "Righteousness is sometimes a breastplate to protect the otherwise defenceless. It is that dear old woman's extraordinary conscientiousness that has saved her from being entirely devoured by the vultures, though she has certainly been gnawed at pretty hard. I can't explain to you, now, just what I mean. Some day, perhaps."

"Oh, do tell me, Catherine."

Again Catherine hesitated before she replied: "She made a certain promise to her husband on his deathbed which her conscience has never allowed her to break, though she has always believed that she was acting against her own interests in keeping it. But it's her loyalty to her promise that's been her breastplate; that has saved her from the vultures."

Margaret considered in silence this suggestive bit of information. It was rather more lucid to her than Catherine suspected. But she was impressed with the sudden realization she had of her friend's intimate knowledge of Daniel's affairs and it flashed upon her that perhaps his seemingly unreasonable objections to their intimacy might have quite another explanation than that he had given it.

In this, however, she was mistaken. Daniel entirely trusted the discretion of his clerk. Not so much because he believed her bound in honour to keep his secrets as because it was the part of a first-class clerk (which she was) to be discreetly silent as to her employer's business operations.

"And now, my dear," Catherine broke in on her thoughts, "since we've threshed things out and have made a compact that we will not again misunderstand each other, I think I'd better get back to my 'job.'"

Margaret gave the order to the chauffeur; and when a little while later, alone in the taxicab on her way home, she found her heart overflowing with a sense of the fulness, the richness of life, and considered how strenuously Daniel and his sisters tried to take from her the comfort, the happiness, of companionship with Catherine and how impossible it would be to make them see what that companionship meant to her, she felt greatly strengthened in her resolve to resist, steadily and persistently, their aggressions upon her personal liberty.

At her own door, as she opened her purse to pay for the cab, she found she had remaining of her monthly allowance only two dollars and the chauffeur's price was three dollars. She hesitated an instant, then telling the man to charge the cab to Mr. Leitzel, she got out hastily and went indoors.

"Rather hard on Daniel to make him pay the costs of my plots gotten up to circumvent his plots! He won't like it. Ah, I've a bright idea! I'll tell him to deduct the three dollars from my next 'allowance.' That will appease him."

But on second thoughts she realized that that same bright idea would surely occur to Daniel without any suggestion from her.

XXI

Margaret felt an impersonal curiosity as to what Daniel would say to her when he came home to his dinner at noon. Jennie and Sadie were also curious as to that. But Daniel himself was curious, too. How was a husband to meet such unnatural behaviour in a wife? Did other men's wives so disregard their husbands' wishes and commands? If women got much more independent it would break up the holy estate of matrimony altogether.

He finally decided, on his homeward walk, that about the only course open to him was to take refuge in a dignified silence, though now that Margaret's time was drawing near, he felt sufficiently apprehensive of the outcome to be very leniently inclined toward her. Funny how he cared for her when she treated him the way she did! He could not help it, somehow. She certainly had a way with her! Well, when she was over her trial and quite herself again, he'd have another try at bringing her to a proper sense of the confederation to which he was accustomed and which was his due.

He wondered uneasily what the people of the town thought of this incongruous intimacy between his clerk and his wife. It certainly passed his comprehension as much as it did that of his sisters that a girl as "high-toned" as Margaret was should insist upon being intimate with his stenographer. That Miss Hamilton was equally "high-toned," he was incapable of recognizing. Jennie had voiced his own sentiments when a few days before she had exclaimed, "When she could run with anybody, she goes and picks out an office clerk! It's nothing else, Danny, but that she's bound to act contrary, to show us she don't care if she didn't bring you a dollar to her name!"

However, a letter which he found on the hall table when he reached home diverted not only his own attention, but that of the whole household, from Margaret's case.

It was from the school teacher of Martz Township, who wrote in behalf of his step-mother; and after dinner, as the family sat together, as was their custom, in the sitting-room, for an hour before Daniel went again to his office—Jennie and Sadie fussing about him to make him comfortable, adjusting the window-blind, placing his chair, handing him the newspaper, retying his necktie, brushing his coat collar—Daniel presently opened and read the letter he had received.

Margaret listened to it and to the lengthy discussion which followed with an attention that was to bear early and abundant fruit.

"DEAR FRIEND:

"I am writing for Mrs. Leitzel, to leave you know she had it so bad in her lungs here the past couple weeks the neighbours thought it would give pneumonia, but she got better and now she's up again, but very weak, and I'm leaving you know that we think she ought not to live alone a half a mile away from her nearest neighbour, because if she got so sick that she couldn't help herself, she might die before her neighbours found it out yet that she needed help. And she's too feeble any more to make up her fires and fetch her water from the spring and chop her wood. The house not having any modern improvements, and so much out of repair, it makes it harder, too, for such an old woman. And she has hardly anything to live on. The neighbours say she had either ought to have some one with her, or you ought to take her to your home to live. If not, she'll have to go the poorhouse, and that of course you would not want, either.

"She is better now and says to tell you not to worry, but I warn you she may get down sick again any time, as old as what she is. And I think you have got good cause to worry, though I told her I'd tell you not to. If it hadn't been for the neighbours doing for her this last couple weeks, she'd have died.

"Yours truly,
    "MAYBELLE RAUCH.

"P.S. She says she sends her love to all and that you have got no need to worry."

But Daniel and his sisters did seem to think they had "need to worry" very much, at the startling revelations of this letter, not the revelations as to their step-mother's sufferings and needs, but as to the neighbourhood publicity given to their neglect of her.

"To think she'd go and have that busybody teacher and all her other neighbours in and complain to 'em all like this, so's they write to us yet and ask for help for her! Well, this beats all! She never went this far before!" scolded Jennie.

"Yes, I don't see why she couldn't leave us know herself if she's got any complaints, and not put it out to the whole township like this!" Sadie worried.

"It certainly will make talk out there!" Daniel frowned.

"Enough to get into the newspapers if she doesn't watch out!"

"But how," Margaret ventured a question, "could she let you know except in the way she's taking, since she can't write herself? And how could she help having the neighbours in if she was ill and helpless and alone?"

"She could anyhow have sent us a postal card to say she was sick and wanted one of us to come out," said Jennie.

"Would you have gone to her?"

"Of course one of us would have gone."

"Maybe she couldn't even write a postal card, or get out to mail it if she did write it, if she's so old and feeble, and was ill."

"If that was the case," said Daniel, "then to avoid a repetition of the occurrence, I don't see what else we are to do but put her into a home."

"You know how she's against that, Danny," said Jennie. "If you decide to do it, you'll have a time with her! And those neighbours all taking her part!"

"This impertinent teacher," said Daniel, tapping the letter he held, "has the face to reproach us, you notice, for not keeping the place in repair! It wasn't our business to keep it in repair when we never get any rent for it."

"Yes, it does seem as if Mom might have kept it in repair when she was getting it rent free," said Jennie. "I don't see why she has not been able to save something in all these years from what she's earnt from her vegetable garden."

"She certainly hasn't managed good," said Sadie.

"And to think of the cheek of those neighbours!" said Jennie wrathfully. "Saying we had ought to take her in here to live with us yet! As if she was our own flesh and blood!"

"What would Hiram say to something like this coming!" Sadie speculated; "when he thinks we did too much in not charging her rent."

"Well," Daniel suddenly announced with a magnanimous air that seemed to swell his chest, "I'll send her a check. I'll send her five dollars. Maybe I'll make it ten."

"Ten dollars yet, Danny!" said Sadie, regarding her brother with affectionate admiration.

"I'm not sure I'll send as much as ten. But anyhow five."

"She'll be sure to show the check around to prove to those neighbours how good you are to her."

"And there will be some among them," said Daniel indignantly, "that will be ready enough to call it stingy!"

"Oh, well, some folks would say it was stingy if you sent her twenty-five dollars yet!"

"If you and Sadie want to put a little to what I send," Daniel tentatively suggested, "we might make it ten or fifteen."

"Well," said Jennie reluctantly, "it ain't fair for you to pay all, either. What do you say, Sadie?"

"Well," Sadie hesitatingly agreed; "for all, I did want to get a new fancy for my white hat. How much will you give, Jennie?"

"Well, if you and I each give two-fifty to Danny's five or ten, that ought to stop her neighbours' talking out there."

"All right," Sadie pensively agreed.

"No use asking Hiram to contribute," Daniel growled, "when he thinks we ought to charge her rent for the place. He gets angry whenever he hears I gave her a little. I told him once, 'If I can better afford than you can to give her a little, and I don't ask you to help out, what are you kicking about?' 'It's the principle of it,' he said. 'If you give her money, it's admitting you owe it to her, or you wouldn't give it to her. Now I contend that we don't owe her anything.' 'Well, then,' I said, 'when I give her a little now and then, I'll put it down on my accounts under Christian Charities. Will that satisfy you?' But no, even that didn't satisfy him. He's all for putting her to a home. And it looks now as if that's what we'll have to do pretty soon," Daniel concluded, rising to go to his office.

Margaret looked on in silence as Jennie and Sadie each counted out carefully from their purses two dollars and a half and passed it over to their brother.

"I'll send a check, then, to mother for fifteen dollars," he said as he put the money into his own purse. "I'll make it fifteen," he nodded. "I'm willing to make it fifteen. That will certainly settle the gossips out there and keep her going for a while comfortably."

He came across the room to Margaret's chair by the window.

"Good-bye, my dear," he said, bending to kiss her; and it took all her self-control not to shrink in utter repugnance from his caress.

"Oh!" she inwardly moaned as she turned to gaze out of the window when he had gone, "what crime have I committed in marrying a man I——"

But even her innermost secret thought recoiled from the admission that she despised her husband, the father of her child.

She went upstairs to her room to spend the time, while she waited for the hour of Catherine's arrival, in putting some last touches to the baby outfit she had made and in writing a note to Daniel's step-mother expressing her sympathy with her recent illness and reiterating her promise to come to see her as soon as possible after her confinement.

"I'll mail it myself," she decided as she sealed and stamped her letter, "or give it to Catherine to mail."

At four o'clock, feeling a little nervous, but quite determined, she went downstairs to await the signal ring at the door. As it was ten days since Catherine had been to the house, Margaret hoped that Emmy, the maid, was off her guard, unless the episode of this morning had caused Jennie and Sadie to renew their watchfulness.

"It's so stupid of them, to say the least, to imagine I'd submit to such interference in my own personal affairs!" she reflected.

She knew their suspicions would be aroused if they found her in the parlour, for of late she spent most of her time in her own room. But she felt quite ready to deal with them as effectively as she had done that morning.

She had not been downstairs long when a ring at the door-bell brought her to her feet, only to sink down again trembling, for it was not the four by twos agreed upon between her and Catherine; and a moment later Mrs. Ocksreider was shown into the parlour. Jennie and Sadie came directly into the room to receive with much satisfaction this distinguished and now frequent visitor who, until Daniel's marriage, had confined her calls on them to once a year; and they looked surprised to see Margaret already there.

"Were you expecting Mrs. Congressman Ocksreider that you're down already?" Jennie suspiciously inquired, when the sisters had greeted Mrs. Ocksreider obsequiously.

"No, but I'm expecting Miss Hamilton," Margaret quietly announced. "I have an appointment with her at four-thirty. When she comes, I shall have to ask you all to excuse me."

Jennie and Sadie looked the consternation they felt at Margaret's audacity, not to say disrespect, in asking such a person as Mrs. Ocksreider to excuse her because of an appointment with that Hamilton girl!

"It's to be hoped," Jennie rapidly thought, "that Mrs. Ocksreider will think it's a business appointment she's got with our Danny's clerk," while Sadie ostentatiously consulted her new wrist-watch to see how soon they might expect the objectionable Miss Hamilton.

"You and your husband's stenographer seem to be great friends," said Mrs. Ocksreider with what seemed to Margaret a rather malicious enjoyment of her sisters-in-law's evident discomfiture.

"We are," said Margaret.

"I've always heard those Hamiltons very well spoken of, as very nice, worthy people," Mrs. Ocksreider said in a tone of kindly condescension. "Where do they live, Mrs. Leitzel?"

That Mrs. Ocksreider shouldn't even know where they lived, put them of course outside the pale. Jennie and Sadie suffered acutely at Margaret's reply.

"They live in a small rented house on Green Street," she said, and added: "One of the few really distinguished homes in our town."

"'Distinguished?'" repeated Mrs. Ocksreider, puzzled.

"I mean, rather, it is a home that has distinction, by reason of its inmates and its furnishings."

"Its furnishings?" questioned Mrs. Ocksreider, still puzzled.

"Its pictures and books and general good taste. One of the few households that have pictures and books."

"Oh, but we all have pictures and books, Mrs. Leitzel!"

"Real pictures, I mean, and real books, too."

"But I'm sure most families of our class have the classics in their homes," Mrs. Ocksreider protested.

"The classics' do help to furnish a room nicely, don't they?" Margaret granted. "But the Hamiltons have books which they read. French and German as well as English."

"Well, of course, a public school teacher's home would be likely to have all kinds of books," Mrs. Ocksreider conceded, "that society people wouldn't buy."

"Of course," Margaret agreed.

"But I don't see why that should make their little home on Green Street what you called it—'distinguished.'"

"But I said the furnishings and the inmates gave it distinction. You see, I know because I am very intimate with them."

"I have heard that you were. It is so nice for your husband's little stenographer that you should take her up like that. It's so unusual, too. She's very fortunate, I'm sure."

"It's rather she that has taken me up. I'm quite proud that she thinks me worth the time she gives me. You see she's more than Mr. Leitzel's stenographer: she's an able law clerk. Mr. Leitzel says she's indispensable to him."

"Then he and his sisters share your enthusiasm over the Hamiltons?" Mrs. Ocksreider inquired in a tone of polite skepticism.

"I am the only one of us all who is intimate with them," Margaret complacently stated.

"I didn't see them at your reception last fall, did I?"

"They didn't come," Margaret readily answered. "You know they don't go into society at all."

Jennie and Sadie felt cold as they heard these shameless admissions, their Danny's wife bragging of her intimacy with people whom she openly advertised as living in a rented house on a side street and as not going into society! Not to go into society was, in the Leitzels' eyes, to be so abjectly unimportant as to make you want to get off the earth. And Margaret flaunted it!

"Ain't she the contrary piece though!" Jennie inwardly raged.

"Ah!" Margaret almost jumped from her chair as the door-bell at this moment rang "four by twos."

"That's Miss Hamilton now," she announced, rising and walking as quickly as she could (which was not very quick) across the room. "Will you please excuse me, Mrs. Ocksreider? I am sorry, but it is an appointment——"

But as she reached the door which opened into the hall, she saw the front door closed abruptly by Emmy, the maid.

Instantly stepping back into the parlour, Margaret hurried to the window, rapped upon it, then raised it and leaned out to speak to Miss Hamilton on the pavement. "Emmy made a mistake; I am at home, Catherine. Come back, and I'll open the door."

She closed the window and again made her way heavily across the room, smiling in a friendly way upon Mrs. Ocksreider as she passed her. "A mistake of the maid's. I'm seeing so few people just now," she dropped an explanation on her way.

Mrs. Ocksreider's subsequent description of the scene, in which the Leitzel sisters' horror at Mrs. Leitzel's innocent candour about "those Hamiltons," and the young woman's clever outwitting of her two would-be "keepers," afforded most delectable entertainment to New Munich society for two months to come.

XXII

It was late in October that the twins were born, a boy and a girl, and Margaret did not rise from her bed for a month. It was six weeks before she got downstairs.

Long before the trained nurse left her, she realized what, before her confinement, she had dimly foreseen, the struggle to the death which she would certainly have with Jennie's strong prejudices in favour of old-fashioned country methods of taking care of a baby. It was only the doctor's powers of persuasion that induced the nurse, harassed beyond endurance by Jennie's interference with her methods, to remain with her patient until she was no longer needed.

"You poor thing, you certainly are up against it!" was her parting bit of sympathy to Margaret. "She'll kill off those precious twinlets for you, or she'll kill you. One of you has got to die! The woman's a holy terror, my dear! And the other one, that wears Mother Hubbards and Kate Greenaways and Peter Thompsons and Heaven knows what, she's nearly as bad as her sister about these babies. I don't know what you're going to do! You may be able to protect them when you're with them; but you've got to get out sometimes for an airing without dragging the baby-coach along, and those two"—indicating, with a twirl of her thumb, the twins' redoubtable aunts—"will certainly kill off your babies for you while you're out."

"If you're sure of that I'll never go out."

"And you can't look for your husband to help you any," continued the nurse. "Crazy as he is over the twinnies, he'll help the old ladies kill them off, because he thinks their ancient ideas are right. The old ladies, for that matter, are nearly as crazy over the babies as he is. You'd think nobody but Mr. Danny Leitzel had ever had twins before. I never saw such a looney lot of people. But it's their love for those children that's going to make them kill them, for it does beat all the way you can't knock a new idea into any of them."

In the very hour of the nurse's departure, Jennie, supported by Sadie as always, swooped down upon Margaret to insist, with the triple force of conviction, of tyranny, and of her love for Danny's precious babies, that they be brought up as she knew how babies should be, and not by the murderous modern methods of exposing them to the night air, of bathing them all over every day even in winter, of feeding them, even up to the age of one year, on nothing but milk, of taking them outdoors every day in winter as well as in summer.

"Many's the little green mound in the cemetery that hadn't ought to be there!" Sadie sentimentally warned Margaret. "So you let us teach you how to take care of Danny's babies!"

Well, the conflict or convictions between the mother, on the one side, and the aunts and the father on the other, was not settled in a day, nor yet in a week. It was, indeed, prolonged to the inevitable end. But while the strife and tumult of battle raged, the mother's will was carried out, at the cost to her of a nervous energy she was in no wise strong enough to expend.

The fact that the twins thrived wonderfully under Margaret's régime did not in the least modify the Leitzels' prejudice against it. Daniel could not help believing profoundly in the wisdom of his sisters, since they had made such a success of him. And never once in his life had he failed to "come out on top" when following their advice. He admired and respected them; and he felt as much affection for them as he was capable of feeling for any one. So that, with his loyalty to them challenged by that force which to most men is the strongest in life—the love of a woman—the atmosphere of his home was, just at present, rather uncomfortably surcharged.

But in spite of this and of his actual bewilderment at the continued obstinacy of a wife who, though tenderly beloved, indulged, and petted, dared to stand out against not only his sisters but against himself, Daniel was so radiantly proud and happy at finding himself the father of a son and daughter at one stroke that he discussed with every one he met the charms, the characteristics, the food, and the habits of his offspring; told his colleagues in business what food-formula agreed with his girl baby, who was being brought up on the bottle, the mother being able to nurse only one child and that one being, of course, by his wish, the boy; delivered to every one who would hear him his views on Modern Fallacies in the Care of Infants; and invited the opinions even of his employees as to suitable or desirable names for the daughter, the son being of course Daniel, Junior.

It was one mild day in January, when, after a siege of more than usually bitter opposition on Jennie's part to the twins being kept on the piazza all the morning, Margaret found herself, during the afternoon, in a blessed solitude in the family sitting-room, Jennie and Sadie having gone out calling. So tired and heartsick was she that she did not even feel any desire to call up Catherine and ask her to share her few hours of freedom from interference and fear of harm to her babies. The twins were again healthily sleeping on the porch outside the sitting-room and Margaret gave herself up to the sweet peace of this respite, reading, dreaming, resting, when presently the door-bell rang, and a moment later Emmy ushered into the sitting-room a feeble old woman dressed in the plain religious habit of the Mennonites.

Margaret instantly knew who the visitor was, and as she went to her, took her two hands in both her own, kissed her and looked down into the motherly old face with its expression of childlike innocence and sweetness, she was thankful that the rest of the family was not at home and that she could for a little while bask in the warmth of this kindly human countenance.

When she had made her visitor comfortable in Danny's big easy-chair before the fire and had had Emmy bring in some hot tea and toast, the old woman's beaming gratitude betrayed how unlooked-for were such attentions in this home of her step-children.

"I'll soon get my breath," she feebly said as she sipped her tea. "I do get out of puff so quick, still, since my lungs took so bad this fall."

"It was really too much of a trip for you to take, and all alone," said Margaret solicitously. "I was just this very day deciding that I would go out to see you some time this week, if I could manage it. It's very hard for me to get away or I should have been to see you before this."

"Well, my dear, what brang me in to-day was that I just had to see Danny and the girls on a little business, and so my neighbour fetched me in in his automobile. I couldn't spare the money to come by train. But," she said tremulously, "he made his automobile go so unmannerly fast, I didn't have no pleasure. He said he ain't commonly got the fashion of going so fast, but, you see, he raced another automobile. He took me along for kindness, but indeed I'm sorry to say I didn't enjoy myself."

"It was a strain on you, I can see," said Margaret sympathetically.

"But the tea's making me feel all right again," said Mrs. Leitzel reassuringly. "It's wonderful kind of you to give it to me; but I didn't want to make no bother. I seen Danny down at his office, and when he told me the girls wasn't home this after, I came up here on the chanct of seein' you alone, and them dear little twinses! Indeed I felt I got to see them two twin babies before I died a'ready. You see I knowed by your nice letters to me that you'd treat me kind, and indeed I had afraid to try to go back home alone on the train; I conceited that mebby you'd take me to the depot," she said with timid wistfulness, "and put me on the right train, and then I wouldn't have been so afraid. Danny thinks I went straight off home by myself. But indeed I didn't darst to."

"Of course I'll take care of you. But you must not think of leaving before to-morrow when you've had a chance to get thoroughly rested."

"Oh, but, my dear," said Mrs. Leitzel nervously, "Danny give me the money to pay my way back home and he thinks I went. And you see, it would put the girls out to have to make up the spare bed just for me."

"But who could be more important than you—you who took care of them all when they were children? Indeed I shan't let you go a step to-day."

"Did they tell you I took care of them, my dear?" asked Mrs. Leitzel, puzzled. "Because they never talked to me that way. And Danny tried to show me this after, when I put it to him that now I couldn't hold out no longer to support myself gardening on the old place—he said I hadn't no claim on him. I don't know," she added sadly, "what I'll do. I'm too old and feeble to work any more, my dear. God knows I would if I could. I'd work for all of them as well as for myself, the way I used to, if I had strength to. But I come in to-day to tell Danny that at last I'm done out. Yes, the doctor says I got tendencies and things and that I got to be awful careful."

"'Tendencies?'" asked Margaret.

"He says I got somepin stickin' in me."

"Something sticking in you! Do you mean that you swallowed a bone or something?"

"No, my dear, I didn't swallow nothin'. I got a tendency stickin' in me that might give pneumonia. So I come to ask Danny to-day if—if he couldn't mebby spare me something," she faltered, "to live on for the little time I got left, so that"—a childlike fear in her aged eyes—"I don't have to go to the poorhouse!"

"When you told Danny all this," asked Margaret, laying her hand on Mrs. Leitzel's, "he said you had no claim on him?"

The old woman's lips quivered and she pressed them together for an instant before she answered.

"He told me he'd talk it all over oncet with Hiram and the girls. But," she shook her head, "I'm afraid Hiram's less merciful than any of my children and he'll urge 'em to put me to such a home for paupers; and, oh, Margaret—dare I call you Margaret?"

"What else would you call your son's wife, dearie?"

"I have so glad Danny has such a sweet wife! I wouldn't of believed he'd marry a lady that would be so nice and common to me. It wonders me! I can't hardly believe it!"

"But you are good to me, making me that lovely quilt and the baby socks. I use the quilt all the time and one of the twins is wearing the socks now. How could even Hiram be hard to you?"

"But Hiram and the others is wery different to what you are." Mrs. Leitzel shook her head. "Danny says if he did pay me a little to live on, Hiram would have awful cross at him. You see, my dear, the reason I ain't got anything saved, as they think I had ought to have, is that I never could make enough off of the wegetables I raised in the backyard to keep myself and pay for all the repairs on the old place, for all I done a good bit; enough anyhow to keep the old place from fallin' in on me. I don't know how I'd of lived all these years if it hadn't of been for the kindness of my neighbours. And now Danny says if I can't keep myself at all no more——" Again she pressed her lips together for an instant. "He don't see nothing for it but that I go to a old woman's home. He calls it a old woman's home, but he means the poorhouse."

"Mother," said Margaret, clasping the hand she held, "I wish you would tell me the whole story of your life with Daniel and Hiram and 'the girls.' Begin, please, away back at 'Once upon a time.'"

Mrs. Leitzel smiled as she looked gently and gratefully upon Daniel's young wife who wasn't too proud to call her "Mother."

"Well, my dear, I married John Leitzel when Danny was only six months old, because them children needed a mother. John drank hard and it was too much for them young folks to earn the living and keep house and take care of a baby. I married John because I pitied 'em all and so's I could take hold and help. Jennie was fifteen, Sadie ten, and Hiram five, and then the baby, Danny. I sent the three older ones to school and I took in washings and kep' care of the baby and did the housekeeping and the sewing. I kep' Jennie in school till she could pass the County Superintendent's examination a'ready and get such a certificate you mind of, and get elected to teach the district school. And with all my hard work, I kep' her dressed as well as I otherwise could. For I was always handy with the needle and Jennie and Sadie was always so fond for the clo'es. Well, when at last Jennie come home with her certificate to teach, my but we was all proud! Indeed, I wasn't more proud when Hiram got his paper that he was now a real preacher—sich a seminary preacher, mind you!—though that was a long time afterward. Well, I thought it would go easier for me, mebby, when Jennie got her school. But you see, she had so ambitious to dress nice and do for Danny (he was such a smart little fellah) that I had still to take in washings and go out by the day to work. Hiram he worked the little farm we had and I helped him, too, in the busy seasons to save the cost of a hired man, for our place had such a heavy mortgage that the interest took near all we could scrape together. Yes, for nine years and a half we struggled along like that, and then at last John died. And mind you, the wery next month after he died, we all of a suddint found coal on our land! Yes, who'd ever of looked for such an unexpected ewent as that! Ain't?"

"To whom did the land belong?" asked Margaret.

"It had belonged to my husband's first wife, but she had willed it over to him before she died. So it was hisn."

"Oh, but, my dear, then you were entitled to one third of it, if you didn't sign away your rights."

"Indeed, no, I didn't sign nothing. Leave me tell you something, my dear: John on his deathbed he thanked me for all I done and his dying orders to me was, 'Don't you never leave Jennie and the rest get you to sign away your rights in the farm that you worked so hard to keep in the family. If it wasn't for you,' he said, 'we would of been sold out of here long ago, and the children all bound out and me in the poorhouse! And if I had the money for a lawyer, I'd sign the whole farm over to you before I die.' 'No, John,' I said, 'that wouldn't be right, neither, to give it to me over your children's heads.' 'Well, anyway,' he says, 'it's too late now, so you just pass me your solemn promise on my deathbed that you'll never leave 'em persuade you to sign nothing without you first leave one of your Mennonite brethren look it over and say you ain't signin' away your rights.' So I passed my promise and I've kep' it, though it has certainly went hard for me to keep it. Danny worried me often a'ready these thirty years back, to sign a paper, and it used to make him wonderful put out when I had to tell him, still, that I'd sign if he'd leave one of our Mennonite brethren read it first and say if I was breakin' my word to John or no. Danny always said he didn't want our affairs made so public and the Mennonite brother would have too much to say. So then I had to say I couldn't sign it; I couldn't break my word to John on his deathbed. Many's the time I was sorry I passed that promise to John—they all have so cross at me because I won't sign nothin'. You see, they always was generous to me, giving me the house and backyard to live in without rent. But to be sure I couldn't break my word to my dying man!"

Margaret saw that there had been no self-interest in her refusal to sign away her rights, but that the binding quality of a deathbed promise was to her a fetish, a superstition. And it was this, no doubt, that Catherine had meant in speaking of her "breast-plate of righteousness," her conscientious devotion to her solemn vow had shielded her from the snare of the fowler; from "the greed of the vulture," Catherine had said.

"And lately," Mrs. Leitzel continued her story, "Danny didn't bother me no more to sign nothing. But to-day," she concluded, suddenly looking very weak and helpless, as she leaned far back in her chair, "to-day he ast me again, and he said it couldn't make no matter to me now when I was so near my end, and if I'd sign a paper he'd not leave the others put me to the poorhouse. But I told him if I was so soon to come before my Maker, I darsent go with a broken promise on my soul. If only I hadn't never passed that promise, my dear! John meant it in kindness to me, but you see," she suddenly sobbed, "it's sendin' me to the poorhouse to end my days!"

"Oh, but my dear!" exclaimed Margaret, her face flushed with excitement, "why didn't you, from the very first, get your one third interest in those coal lands? You were and are entitled to it!"

"Well," said Mrs. Leitzel, "right in the beginning when they first found the coal, they got me to say I'd be satisfied to take the house and backyard for my share; not to keep, of course, but to live on for the rest of my life; and seeing the land had been their own mother's, that was a lot more'n I had the right to look for. To be sure," she gently explained, "you couldn't expect your step-children to care for you as your own flesh and blood might."

"You cared for them as though they were your own flesh and blood. Tell me, you did not sign an agreement, did you, to accept the house and backyard in lieu of your one third interest in the estate?"

"No, for that would of been breakin' the promise I passed to John. For you see, Danny never would leave one of the brethren look over the paper he wanted me to sign, and say whether I could do it without breakin' my word. So I never signed nothing."

"Then the only thing you need to establish your absolute right in one third of the income of the coal lands (now enjoyed by your step-children and excluding you) is the proof that the title to those lands was vested absolutely in your husband at the time of his death. If it wasn't, you have no case. If it was, you've plenty of money! You see, my brother-in-law is a lawyer and I've imbibed a little bit of legal knowledge. But I have an intimate friend, Miss Catherine Hamilton, who knows nearly as much law as Daniel does and I'll get her to look up the court-house records for your husband's title to that land, and then, my dear, if we find it—— Oh, my stars!"

"But, Margaret," the old woman protested fearfully, "you'll get 'em all down on you if you go and do somepin like that!"

"You see," Margaret gravely explained, "I am living on this money which belongs to you, and my children will be living on it, inheriting it. I couldn't bear that, of course."

"Do you mean," faltered Mrs. Leitzel, "you think they cheated me? There's others tried to hint that to me and I wouldn't never listen to it. Why, Hiram's a Christian minister and they're all church members and professin' Christians! They wouldn't steal, my dear—and from an old woman like me!"

"It's been done, however, by church members and professing Christians. We'll investigate it, my dear," Margaret firmly repeated.

"But I wouldn't want to be the cause of you and Danny's fallin' out, little girl! That I certainly wouldn't. And, dear me!—if you got Jennie down on you yet!"

"She couldn't be much more down on me than she is. And during all these years, you know, you've stood up to them for the sake of a sacred promise. I hope I haven't less courage."

"Don't you think Danny's too smart a lawyer, my dear, for you to get 'round him?" Mrs. Leitzel anxiously tried to avert the disaster which Margaret's suggestion surely presaged.

"My brother-in-law is a smart lawyer, too. I'll write to him this very night, put the case to him (omitting names) and ask his advice. Oh," she suddenly lowered her voice, "here come 'the girls.' Do not breathe a word of what I've said to you!"

"Oh, no, indeed I won't. I know how cross they'd have at me! My dear," she added, clinging to Margaret's hand, "stay by me, will you? Please! Jennie and Sadie won't like it so well that I come. I conceited I'd get away before they got back, and they're likely to scold me some, my dear, and——"

Margaret stooped over her impulsively and kissed her forehead. "Come out to the porch with me and see the babies." When a moment later Jennie and Sadie came into the room they saw, through the long French window opening on to the porch, their step-mother bending over the sleeping infants in the big double coach, and Margaret standing at her side, her arm about her waist.

XXIII

"Why!" exclaimed Jennie as she grudgingly shook hands with her step-mother when Margaret returned with her to the sitting-room. "You here! We saw Danny downtown just now and he said he gave you money to get home."

"Yes," added Sadie, also shaking hands reluctantly, "we didn't look to see you here. Anyhow Danny thought you went to the depot from his office."

"But," smiled Margaret, "she gave me the pleasant surprise of a call. I am so glad, because I wanted so much to know her, my husband's mother and the babies' grandmother! How pretty your flowers look, Sadie!" she added diplomatically and quite insincerely, for she groaned inwardly at the bunch of little artificial roses Sadie girlishly wore on the lapel of her coat.

"What is this to do?" Jennie suddenly demanded as her eyes fell upon the tea-table.

"We've been having tea and toast."

"Well!" breathed Sadie.

"Upon my word!" exclaimed Jennie. "You stopped Emmy in her Sa'urday's work to make tea and toast in the middle of the afternoon yet!"

"It took her just fifteen minutes."

"She ain't ever to be hindered in her Sa'urday's work! She has a cake to bake for Sunday then!"

"But you know," said Margaret patiently, "you stopped her on wash day to make tea for Mrs. Ocksreider."

"Well, but Mom ain't used to tea in the afternoon and Mrs. Ocksreider is. Anyhow, who's keeping house here, Margaret?"

"But surely I may have a cup of tea with your mother if I wish to, in this house!"

"But it up-mixes my accounts when you do somepin like this. Danny pays half of all the expenses here and Sadie and I pay half."

"Oh, I see," Margaret breathed rather than spoke. "But after all, Jennie, it's quite a simple matter—charge the tea, sugar, milk, bread, and butter to Daniel's side of your account and I'll take the responsibility of it."

Jennie turned abruptly to her step-mother. "It's getting late on you, Mom, to get out home. You don't want to get there after dark, with a half a mile to walk from the station yet. Before I take off my coat and hat, I better see you on the street car that'll take you to the depot for the five o'clock train."

"Yes, Jennie," the old woman submissively answered, "I was just a-goin' to start to go when you come."

She rose with an effort from the comfortable chair before the fire in which Margaret had again placed her. But Margaret at once pressed her back into her seat.

"You will be glad to know, Jennie, that I have persuaded mother to spend the night with us," she said, "as she is too tired from her journey to go back before to-morrow."

"She never stops the night with us, Margaret," Jennie coldly returned. "Come on, Mom, I'll put you on the street car."

"But isn't it nice," cried Margaret, holding her arm around Mrs. Leitzel to keep Jennie off, "that I've succeeded in coaxing her to stay to-night? Such a pleasant surprise for Daniel when he comes home, to find you here, dear! What is home without a grandmother? Good discipline for Daniel, too, to have to give up this armchair for one evening! Even I have to get out of it when he wants it. But naturally he can't put his mother out of the only really comfortable chair in the house."

"But Danny paid for that chair," explained Sadie. "It would be funny—ain't?—if he couldn't sit in his own chair when he wants!"

"The spare-room bed ain't made up," Jennie frowned at Margaret. "And nobody has time to make it up at four o'clock on Saturday afternoon! Anyhow, strangers stopping over night is apt to give Sadie the headache. And Mom never wants to be away from her own bed. She won't can home herself in a strange bed, can you, Mom?"

But Margaret spoke before Mrs. Leitzel could reply. "I'll make up the guest bed. It won't take me ten minutes. Mother"—she patted Mrs. Leitzel's shoulder—"I'll be right downstairs again in ten minutes."

But Mrs. Leitzel clung to her hand. "Don't let me alone with—stay by me, Margaret——" she pitifully pleaded.

"You shall come upstairs with me, then, to my room," Margaret said, helping her, now, to rise to her feet.

"No, Margaret, Mom's to go back on the five o'clock train," affirmed Jennie peremptorily. "Our Danny give her the money to go back. It ain't for you to be using our clean linens to make up the spare bed. Come on, Mom."

Jennie laid an ungentle grasp upon her step-mother's arm, but Margaret, her face suddenly ablaze with indignation, confronted her.

"Jennie! This is my husband's home, and his feeble mother shall be his guest and mine until to-morrow morning."

"She ain't his mother, she ain't even a blood relation. And what right have you, I'd like to know, to meddle in our family affairs?" Jennie fiercely demanded. "It's just your contrariness that makes you want to do everything that you see will spite us; for what other reason would a person like you have for taking up with an uneducated old woman like Mom? You wouldn't look at a person like her if it was not to spite us!"

"What right have I? The right of the humane to protect the helpless from brutality, under any and all circumstances, without exception. She shall not leave this house to-day!"

"Now, Mom," Sadie turned on her step-mother, "you see what you make by coming here like this, without leaving us know! Ain't you worrying us enough all the time, without raising more trouble between us and Danny's wife yet?"

"Yes, yes, I'll go. Please, my dear"—she turned to Margaret,—"leave me go. I'd rather die on the way home than stay and make it unhappy for you, Margaret! Danny will take up for them, you know, so I can't stay and make trouble. Leave me go, my dear!"

"But if you don't make your mother welcome here," Margaret addressed both Jennie and Sadie, "I shall have to go with her. I can take her to Catherine Hamilton's for the night. Or," she added with sudden inspiration, "to Mrs. Ocksreider's, and ask her if she won't give her a bed until the morning. She shall not take that journey to-night!"

Jennie glared in baffled fury, while Sadie turned white with dismay.

"Danny won't leave you do such an outrageous thing!" the elder sister said hoarsely.

"Daniel can't stop me. Come, mother."

"You don't mean to say you'd do as mean a thing as that—take Mom to Mrs. Ocksreider's!"

"But I am so sure that Mrs. Ocksreider is the very person who would be very glad to receive her for the night."

"You up and tell me to my face you'd disgrace us like that!"

"But where would the disgrace come in?" asked Margaret innocently.

"Where would the disgrace come in?" repeated Jennie hotly. "Don't you see any disgrace in telling Mrs. Ocksreider that we won't leave our mother (even if she is our step-mother) sleep at our place over night?"

"Then you admit that you are acting disgracefully in turning her out?"

"You wait till Danny comes home and he'll show you if you can go against me like this in his house!" Jennie violently threatened, more furious than ever at being trapped by her own words. "Now you leave Mom be till I take her out to the car!"

"No, Jennie, if she goes I go with her—to our friend, Mrs. Ocksreider. Therefore, it behooves you——"

But it was just at this instant that the sitting-room door opened and Daniel walked into their midst.

"Margaret! I've got an automobile at the door. Get your hat——"

He stopped short in astonishment at sight of his step-mother, at Margaret's attitude of shielding her against the evidently furious antagonism of Jennie and the cold disapproval of Sadie.

"Well?" he demanded testily. "What's up? How did you get up here, mother?"

"Yes, how did she, when you gave her the money to go home yet?" scolded Sadie.

Margaret, leaving the statement of the situation to Jennie, remained silent.

"Who brought you up here?" Daniel inquired of the old woman.

"I come by myself, Danny. I wanted to see your wife and the twinses, and I conceited I'd be gone before the girls got home. But I'll go right aways now. I'm sorry I come. I didn't want to make no trouble—I——"

She made a movement from Margaret's side, but the latter clasped her firmly.

"Margaret," commanded Daniel, "let her go."

"I have invited her to spend the night here, Daniel. She is not able to go home to-night."

"I'll take care of that—this is not your affair. Let her alone! Take your hands off her!"

"Will you let her spend the night here?"

"I said I would take care of that. Take your hands off her."

Margaret obeyed.

"Now come here, mother."

Mrs. Leitzel walked feebly toward him, but Margaret walked beside her.

"Now, you see, Danny, how contrary she acts!" Jennie broke forth. "I wanted to take Mom out to the trolley car and Margaret would not leave her come along, when Mom said she wanted to come, too!"

"Well, I'm here now," returned Daniel grimly. "I'll take you to the station, mother," he pronounced conclusively, taking the old woman's arm.

"Daniel! Your mother can't go home alone this evening! It will be cruel of you to send her!"

Daniel, ignoring her, led his mother to the hall.

"I tell you I'm going to stop this cruelty!" cried Margaret, darting upstairs to get her wraps.

She was down again almost immediately, her coat over her arm, but when she reached the sidewalk the automobile containing her husband and his mother was beyond her reach.

"I may be able to get to the station before that five o'clock train!" she thought, starting almost on a run to go the length of the town to the depot, putting on her coat and gloves as she went. "I believe his mother will die on the way if she goes, and has to walk that half-mile alone in the dark, after being subjected to all this horrible scene! Oh, my God! What people they are!"

She realized, on her way, that her purse was empty, her monthly allowance having been spent, and that she had not even money for trolley car fares—a serious handicap in her efforts to help Mrs. Leitzel.

When, panting for breath, a sharp pain in her side, she reached the station, the train to Martz was just pulling out.

Daniel, smiling blandly, came toward her along the platform.

"God help me!" was the cry of her heart, "that I cannot even hate him—he is too utterly pitiable! If I could hate him, there might be some hope for us!"

"Want to take a little ride, my dear?" he inquired, waving his hand to the waiting automobile.

"Take me home," she returned weakly, feeling suddenly collapsed and helpless.

"You know," he said as he helped her into the car, "you ought not to excite yourself like this—it's bad for Daniel Junior's milk—about something, too, that is no concern of yours. And I want to warn you also," he added, lowering his voice so that the chauffeur might not hear him, as the car turned into the street, "that you've got to refrain from offending Jennie and Sadie so constantly. They have a lot of money to leave to our children. Keep on offending them as you are doing and they'll will all they have to Hiram's children!" said Daniel in a tone that expressed all the horror that such a possibility contained for him.

Margaret did not reply.

"You get me?" Daniel inquired.

"Considerations like that, Daniel, have never entered into my philosophy of life, thank God!"

"Margaret, you really must break yourself of this dreadful habit of swearing! It's so unladylike! And so unchristian!"

"Oh, my good Lord, Daniel! Don't dare to talk to me about anything's being 'unchristian,' when you have just done a cruel, cruel thing to your aged, helpless mother! I don't profess and loudly flaunt my 'Christian principles,' but I do believe in the Golden Rule. Evidently you don't. Don't speak to me!"

"Hoity-toity! Cut out these tantrums, Margaret; they're bad for the boy, you know."

"Why don't you tell the Y.W.C.A. about your smart 'deal' with your tenant, George Trout, and your treatment of your step-mother? Maybe they'd send you another congratulatory letter that you could have published in the Intelligencer."

"You heed my warning about offending Jennie and Sadie," was Daniel's reply.

"At the time of your father's death was the title of the farm at Martz vested absolutely in him?"

Margaret had the satisfaction of seeing Daniel start and turn red at her question, as he turned abruptly and looked at her.

"What makes you ask that?" he nervously demanded.

"Was it?" she repeated.

"Why do you wish to know?"

"It was," she affirmed.

"How do you know?" he sharply questioned.

"That same old Woman's Intuition."

"I insist on your answering me intelligibly! What do you know of business matters like that anyhow?"

"Not much, but a little."

"Understand, Margaret, once and for all, that my business affairs and that of my folks are no least concern of yours!"

"Yours are."

"They are not!"

"Oh, yes, they are, Daniel. You and I are life partners and I am the mother of your heirs. Therefore, I have everything to do with your business. Neither I nor my children shall live on stolen money."

"Stolen money! You talk to me of 'stolen money,' when I stand in this community as the one honest, upright, Christian lawyer! Gracious, Margaret, I certainly expected that after the children were born I'd have back again the sweet girl I married! I'm beginning to feel that I've been awfully taken in!"

Margaret leaned back in the automobile, closed her eyes, and did not answer. During the remainder of the ride the silence between them was unbroken.