When all were gone, Roger wheeled the low chair to its old place beside the glowing fire, and said:
"Millie, at last we both have a home. See how Belle is smiling at us."
"Dear sister Belle," Mildred murmured, "her words have come true. She said, Roger, when I was fool enough to detest you, that you 'would win me yet,' and you have—all there is of me."
Roger went and stood before the young girl's smiling face, saying earnestly:
"Dear little Belle, 'we SHALL have good times together yet,' or else the human heart with its purest love and deepest yearning is a lie."
Then turning, he took his wife in his arms and said, "Millie darling, we shall never be without a home again. Please God it shall be here until we find the better home of Heaven."
APPENDIX
Christian men and women of New York, you—not the shopkeepers—are chiefly to blame for the barbarous practice of compelling women, often but growing girls, to stand from morning until evening, and often till late in the night. The supreme motive of the majority of the men who enforce this inhuman regulation is to make money. Some are kind-hearted enough to be very willing that their saleswomen should sit down if their customers would tolerate the practice, and others are so humane that they grant the privilege without saying, By your leave, to their patrons.
There is no doubt where the main responsibility should be placed in this case.
Were even the intoxicated drayman in charge of a shop, when sober he would have sufficient sense not to take a course that would drive from him the patronage of the "best and wealthiest people in town." Upon no class could public opinion make itself felt more completely and quickly than upon retail merchants. If the people had the humanity to say, We will not buy a dime's worth at establishments that insist upon a course at once so unnatural and cruel, the evil would be remedied speedily. Employers declare that they maintain the regulation because so many of their patrons require that the saleswoman shall always be standing and ready to receive them. It is difficult to accept this statement, but the truth that the shops wherein the rule of standing is most rigorously enforced are as well patronized as others is scarcely a less serious indictment, and it is also a depressing proof of the strange apathy on the question.