“Father, will you let me say one word before you quite tear me to pieces! A great many people in our church like David Dean. It is all right to bark 'Woof! woof! Throw him out neck and crop!' but you know as well as I do that would split the church.”
“Well, let it split! If we can't have peace—”
“Exactly, father!” Mary said quietly. “If we cannot have peace in the church it will be better for David Dean to go elsewhere, but before that happens—for I think many of our people would leave our church if David goes—shouldn't we do all we can to bring peace? Ellen agrees with me.”
“In a measure I do; yes,” said Ellen Hard-come.
“Ellen and Mr. Hardcome,” Mary continued, “are willing to promise to do nothing immediately if David will go away for a month or two. If we can send him away for a couple of months until some of the bitterest feeling dies everything may be all right. We women will be glad enough to make up and pay back anything we have to borrow from the fund. I think, father, if you spoke to David he might go.”
“Better get rid of him now,” Wiggett growled. Ellen Hardcome smiled. This was what she wanted. Mary looked at the heavy-faced old dictator. She knew her father well enough to feel the hopelessness of her mission. Old Wiggett had never forgiven David for marrying 'Thusia instead of Mary, and because he would a thousand times have preferred David to Derling as a son-in-law he hated David the more.
“It isn't only that David would go, father,” Mary said. “If he is sent away we will lose the Hodges and the Martins and the Ollendorfs and old Peter Grimby. I don't mind those old maid Curlews going, or people like the Hansoms or the Browns, but you know what the Hodges and old Peter Grimby do for the church every year. We thought that if you could get David to take a vacation, explaining to him that it would be a good thing to let everything quiet down—”
Old Sam Wiggett chuckled.
“Who thought! Ellen never thought of that,” he said.
“I thought of it,” said Mary.