Her eyes left the familiar page, wandering far away beyond the fire.
"Is it so hard to bear up under two thousand five hundred a year?" I asked.
The gleam of the fire, or perhaps a fancy out of the far-beyond, lighted her eyes as she answered,
"We began on four hundred and fifty a year; and we were perfectly—"
"Yes, but you forget the parsonage; that was rent free!"
"Four hundred and fifty with rent free—and we had everything we could—"
"You forget again that we had n't even one of our four boys."
Her gaze rested tenderly upon the little chairs between her and the fire, just where the boys had left them at the end of their listening an hour before.
"If you had allowed me," she went on, "I was going to say how glad we ought to be that we are not quite so rich as—"
"We should like to be?" I questioned.