e, 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