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“I think I must try to do something for those poor people, child; it may not be much, but it will be something. The harvest truly is great, but the laborers are few.”

“What will you do, father?”

Marg’et Ann asked the question hesitatingly, dreading the reply. The minister looked at her with anxious eagerness. He was glad of the humble acquiescence that obliged him to put his half-formed resolution into words.

“If the presbytery will release me from my charge here, I may go South for a while. Nancy Helen is quite a girl now, and with Laban and your teaching you could get on. They are bruised for our iniquities, Marg’et Ann,–they are our iniquities, indirectly, child.”

He got up and walked across the rag-carpeted floor. Marg’et Ann sat still in her mother’s chair, looking down at the stripes of the carpet,–dark blue and red and “hit or miss;” her mother had made them so patiently; it seemed as if patience were always under foot for heroism to tread upon. She fought with the ache in her throat a little. The stripes on the floor were beginning to blur when she spoke.

“Isn’t it dangerous to go down there, father, for people like us,–for Abolitionists, I mean; I have heard that it was.”

“Dangerous!” The preacher’s face lighted with the faint, prophetic joy of martyrdom; poor Marg’et Ann had touched the wrong chord. “It cannot be worse for me than it is for them,–I must go,” he broke out impatiently; “do not say anything against it, child!”

And so Marg’et Ann said nothing.

Really there was not much time for words. There were many stitches to be taken in the threadbare wardrobe, concerning which her father was as ignorant and indifferent as a child, before she packed it all in the old carpet sack and nerved herself to see him start.

He went away willingly, almost cheerfully. Just at the last, when he came to bid the younger children good-by, the father seemed for an instant to rise above the reformer. No doubt their childish unconcern moved him.

“We must think of the families that have been rudely torn apart. Surely it ought to sustain us,–it ought to sustain us,” he said to Laban as they drove away.

Two days later they carried him home, crippled for life by the overturning of the stage near Cedar Creek.

He made no complaint of the drunken driver whose carelessness had caused the accident and frustrated his plans; but once, when his eldest daughter was alone with him, he looked into her face and said, absently, rather than to her,–

“Patience, patience; I doubt not the Lord’s hand is in it.”

And Marg’et Ann felt that his purpose was not quenched.

In the spring Lloyd Archer came home. Marg’et Ann had heard of his coming, and tried to think of him with all the intervening years of care and trial added; but when she saw him walking up the path between the flowering almonds and snowball bushes, all the intervening years faded away, and left only the past that he had shared, and the present.

She met him there at her father’s bedside and shook hands with him and said, “How do you do, Lloyd? Have you kept your health?” as quietly as she would have greeted any neighbor. After he had spoken to her father and the children she sat before him with her knitting, a very gentle, self-contained Desdemona, and listened while he told the minister stories of California, mentioning the trees and fruits of the Bible with a freedom and familiarity that savored just enough of heresy to make him seem entirely unchanged.

When Nancy Helen came into the room he glanced from her to Marg’et Ann; the two sisters had the same tints in hair and cheek, but the straight, placid lines of the elder broke into waves and dimples in the younger. Nancy Helen shook hands in a limp, half-grown way, blushingly conscious that her sleeves were rolled up, and that her elders were maturely indifferent to her sufferings; and Lloyd jokingly refused to tell her his name, insisting that she had kissed him good-by and promised to be his little sweetheart when he came back.