Poor William! I never destroyed his illusions, for they were always founded upon the goodness and simplicity of his own nature. But when Mrs. Billywith began to spend three afternoons of the week with him in his study, with nobody but the dead-and-gone Second Samuel to chaperon them, and when William began to neglect his pastoral visiting on this account, I couldn't have felt the call to put an end to the "interpretations" stronger than I did if I had been his guardian angel. The next time she came he was out visiting the sick. "Come right in, Mrs. Billywith," I said, leading her into the study and seating myself opposite her when she had chosen her chair. "William is out this afternoon, but possibly I can help you with the kind of interpretation you ought to do now, better than he can." She stared at me with a look of proud surprise. "You and William have spent a very profitable month, I reckon, on Second Samuel; but I've been thinking that maybe you ought to have a change now and stay at home some and try to interpret your own Samuel. Your husband's given name is Sam, isn't it? He seems to me a neglected prophet, Mrs. Billywith, and needs his spiritual faculties exercised and strengthened more than William does. Besides----" I never finished the sentence. Mrs. Billywith rose with the look of an angel who has been outraged, floated through the open door and disappeared down the shady street. William never knew, or even suspected, why she discontinued so interesting a study, nor why he could never again induce her to give one of her beautiful "Bible readings" on prayer-meeting nights. You will say, of course, that I was jealous of my husband. But I was not jealous for him only as a husband, I was even more jealous for him as the simplest, best, most saintly man I had ever known. And the preacher's wife who does not cultivate the wisdom of a serpent and as much harmlessness of the dove as will not interfere with her duty to him in protecting him from such women--whose souls are merely mortal and who are to be found in so many congregations--may have a damaged priest on her hands before she knows it. And there is not a more difficult soul to restore in this world except a woman's. Ever after it sits uneasy in him. It aches and cries out in darkness even at noonday, and you have to go and do it all over again--the restoring. Some one who understands real moral values ought to make a new set of civil laws that would apply to the worst class of criminals in society: not the poor hungry, simple-minded rogues, the primitive murderers, but the real rotters of honor and destroyers of salvation. Then we should have a very different class of people in the penitentiaries, and not the least numerous among them would be the women who make a religion of sneaking up on the blind male side of good men, without a thought of the consequences. CHAPTER X WILLIAM BECOMES A PRODIGAL