hat came from her playing so much on the
keyboard; the exercise naturally would give her large, robust hands.

Suddenly he remembered about the piano; he had quite forgotten to
solicit her aid in selecting it. He turned, upon the impulse, to go
back. She had not entered the gate as yet, but stood, shiningly visible
under the street lamp, on the sidewalk, and she was looking in his
direction. He turned again like a shot, and started homeward.

The front door of the parsonage was unlocked, and he made his way on
tiptoe through the unlighted hall to the living-room. The stuffy air
here was almost suffocating with the evil smell of a kerosene
lamp turned down too low. Alice sat asleep in her old farmhouse
rocking-chair, with an inelegant darning-basket on the table by her
side. The whole effect of the room was as bare and squalid to Theron's
newly informed eye as the atmosphere was offensive to his nostrils. He
coughed sharply, and his wife sat up and looked at the clock. It was
after eleven.

"Where on earth have you been?" she asked, with a yawn, turning up the
wick of her sewing-lamp again.

"You ought never to turn down a light like that," said Theron, with a
complaining note in his voice. "It smells up the whole place. I never
dreamed of your sitting up for me like this. You ought to have gone to
bed."

"But how could I guess that you were going to be so late?," she
retorted. "And you haven't told me where you were. Is this book of yours
going to keep you up like this right along?"

The episode of the book was buried in the young minister's mind beneath
such a mass of subsequent experiences that it required an effort for him
to grasp what she was talking about. It seemed as if months had elapsed
since he was in earnest about that book; and yet he had left the house
full of it only a few hours before. He shook his wits together, and made
answer--

"Oh, bless you, no! Only there arose a very curious question. You have
no idea, literally no conception, of the interesting and important
problems which are raised by the mere fact of Abraham leaving the city
of Ur. It's amazing, I assure you. I hadn't realized it myself."

"Well," remarked Alice, rising--and with good-humor and petulance
struggling sleepily ill her tone--"all I've got to say is, that if
Abraham hasn't anything better to do than to keep young ministers of the
gospel out, goodness knows where, till all hours of the night, I wish to
gracious he'd staye