nd William have spent a very profitable month, I reckon, on
Second Samuel; but I've been thinking that maybe you ought to have a
change now and stay at home some and try to interpret your own Samuel.
Your husband's given name is Sam, isn't it? He seems to me a neglected
prophet, Mrs. Billywith, and needs his spiritual faculties exercised
and strengthened more than William does. Besides----"

I never finished the sentence. Mrs. Billywith rose with the look of an
angel who has been outraged, floated through the open door and
disappeared down the shady street. William never knew, or even
suspected, why she discontinued so interesting a study, nor why he
could never again induce her to give one of her beautiful "Bible
readings" on prayer-meeting nights.

You will say, of course, that I was jealous of my husband. But I was
not jealous for him only as a husband, I was even more jealous for him
as the simplest, best, most saintly man I had ever known. And the
preacher's wife who does not cultivate the wisdom of a serpent and as
much harmlessness of the dove as will not interfere with her duty to
him in protecting him from such women--whose souls are merely mortal
and who are to be found in so many congregations--may have a damaged
priest on her hands before she knows it. And there is not a more
difficult soul to restore in this world except a woman's. Ever after
it sits uneasy in him. It aches and cries out in darkness even at
noonday, and you have to go and do it all over again--the restoring.

Some one who understands real moral values ought to make a new set of
civil laws that would apply to the worst class of criminals in society:
not the poor hungry, simple-minded rogues, the primitive murderers, but
the real rotters of honor and destroyers of salvation. Then we should
have a very different class of people in the penitentiaries, and not
the least numerous among them would be the women who make a religion of
sneaking up on the blind male side of good men, without a thought of
the consequences.

CHAPTER X

WILLIAM BECOMES A PRODIGAL

William never made but two long journeys away from home. One was to
visit a brother minister; the other was a sort of involuntary excursion
he made away from God in his own mind. And as the first trip led to
the second I will begin with that.

There was a young man in William's class at college named Horace
Pendleton, who entered the ministry with him, and joined the N