f salary, or an
extra allowance. I don't see how I can go on as it is. The sum fixed by
the last Quarterly Conference of the old year, and which I am getting
now, is one hundred dollars less than my predecessor had. That isn't
fair, and it isn't right. But so far from its looking as if I could get
an increase, the prospect seems rather that they will make me pay for
the gas and that sidewalk. I never recovered more than about half of my
moving expenses, as you know, and--and, frankly, I don't know which way
to turn. It keeps me miserable all the while."

"That's where you're wrong," said Mr. Gorringe. "If you let things
like that worry you, you'll keep a sore skin all your life. You take
my advice and just go ahead your own gait, and let other folks do the
worrying. They ARE pretty close-fisted here, for a fact, but you
can manage to rub along somehow. If you should get into any real
difficulties, why, I guess--" the lawyer paused to smile in a
hesitating, significant way--"I guess some road out can be found all
right. The main thing is, don't fret, and don't allow your wife to--to
fret either."

He stopped abruptly. Theron nodded in recognition of his amiable tone,
and the found the nod lengthening itself out into almost a bow as the
thought spread through his mind that this had been nothing more nor less
than a promise to help him with money if worst came to worst. He looked
at Levi Gorringe, and said to himself that the intuition of women was
wonderful. Alice had picked him out as a friend of theirs merely by
seeing him pass the house.

"Yes," he said; "I am specially anxious to keep my wife from worrying.
She was surrounded in her girlhood by a good deal of what, relatively,
we should call luxury, and that makes it all the harder for her to be a
poor minister's wife. I had quite decided to get her a hired girl, come
what might, but she thinks she'd rather get on without one. Her health
is better, I must admit, than it was when we came here. She works out in
her garden a great deal, and that seems to agree with her."

"Octavius is a healthy place--that's generally admitted," replied the
lawyer, with indifference. He seemed not to be interested in Mrs. Ware's
health, but looked intently out through the window at the buildings
opposite, and drummed with his fingers on the arms of his chair.

Theron made haste to revert to his errand. "Of course, your not being in
the Quarterly Conference," he said, "renders certai