"My dear Harriet, I worked over that door in the pitch darkness for two blessed hours."
"I thought you had a candle, Daddy Merle," piped An Petronia sleepily.
"I had, my dear, but no matches, not a single match!"
He pushed back his chair.
"I say! Let's all go and kick the life out of that beastly door!" cried Lionel.
The curate smiled. "I believe I shall sleep better when I know how it works."
"I should think you'd excommunicate it," said Kate.
Whereupon Martin Luther jumped to the floor and walked stiffly out of the room. It was exactly as if he said: "I consider that remark in very bad taste," and everybody laughed. Harriet, however, refused to countenance such folly as going into the cellar at that time of the night, and as for An Petronia, the child ought to have been in bed hours ago!
Ten minutes later when the Reverend Horatio Merle was removing various articles from his coat pockets, preparatory to folding the garment for the night, he came across the forgotten page of An Petronia's novel. As he glanced at it he was astonished to find, instead of the large childish writing he had seen there, the small neat hand of a grown person. It was a piece of a torn letter, and An Petronia had made use of the blank side. Nothing very surprising in that.
He laid it down on the dressing table so that he would remember to give it to the little girl in the morning. As he did so, Horatio's eye caught a startling sentence written across the upper corner of the page.