go and in vain. An obstinate man; when
he sets his foot down thou hast to dig it up to move him. I shall not
open the matter with Josiah Langstroth. I have been led to speak
harshly. Farewell."

When Mrs. Swanwick heard of this and had talked of it to Margaret, the
Pearl said, "We will not take the money, and uncle cannot; and it may
go." Her decisiveness both pleased and astonished the mother. It was a
maturing woman who thus anticipated Schmidt's advice and her own, and
here for a little while the matter lay at rest.

Not all Friends, however, were either aware of what Pemberton had
learned or were fully satisfied, so that one day Daniel Offley,
blacksmith, a noisy preacher in meetings and sometimes advised of elders
to sit down, resolved to set at rest alike his conscience and his
curiosity. Therefore, on a February afternoon, being the 22d, and
already honored as the birthday of Washington, he found Margaret alone,
as luck would have it. To this unusual house, as I have said, came not
only statesmen, philosophers, and the rich. Hither, too, came the poor
for help, the lesser Quakers, women and men, for counsel or a little
sober gossip. All were welcome, and Offley was not unfamiliar with the
ways of the house.

He found Margaret alone, and sitting down, began at once and harshly to
question her in a loud voice concerning the story of her worldly vanity,
and asked why she could thus have erred.

The girl had had too much of it. Her conscience was clear, and
Pemberton, whom she loved and respected, had been satisfied, as Schmidt
had told them. She grew red, and rising, said: "I have listened to thee;
but now I say to thee, Daniel Offley, that it is none of thy business.
Go home and shoe thy horses."

He was not thus to be put down. "This is only to add bad temper to thy
other faults. As a Friend and for many of the Society, I would know what
thee has done with thee devil wages of the lottery."

[Illustration: "'Thou canst not shoe my conscience'"]

She looked at him a moment. The big, ruddy face struck her as comical.
Her too often repressed sense of humor helped her, and crying, "Thou
canst not shoe my conscience, Daniel Offley," she fled away up-stairs,
her laughter ringing through the house, a little hysterical, perhaps,
and first cousin to tears. The amazed preacher, left to his meditations,
was shocked into taking off his beaver and saying strong words out of a
far away past.

She was angry beyond the c