"Harriet," he went on at last, "I implore you not to speak to Mr. Baxter. I beseech you to do nothing in this matter."
"But Horatio!"
"I mean it, Harriet. What has happened in this house to-day is an answer to my prayer."
"You're going mad, Horatio!" She tried to rise, but he drew her gently back.
"If you do anything, Harriet, if you do not leave things as they are now in this house, it will be as if Christ came to the door and you slammed the door in His face."
He was terribly in earnest, his voice was steady and his blue eyes met hers calmly; in them shone a light she had loved him for in the long gone days—a light that rarely visited them now.
"Do you mean," she asked at length, "that you want us to do without any servants?"
He put his answer in the form of a question.
"Harriet, do you remember the happiest year of our life, when we had no servant at all except the charwoman who came once a week, when you made the beds and the bread and washed the dishes and I dried them, when you were the cook and four housemaids in one and I was the butler and the footman and the man of all work? I opened the bottle of wine when we had one; I made the fires, except when the coal bill was overdue and there weren't any fires to make; I was the boots, too, and I cleaned the knives and polished our two or three bits of silver. And, when I'd nothing else to do, I wrote my sermons."
The color came into Harriet's face and her eyes shone at the recollection.