William was too dazed by the misfortune of his superannuation to think or plan for the future. For him there was no future. He sat in the chimney corner, following me about the house with his vacant eyes, but really grieving for one of the choice, hard circuits, with its dried-fruit salary, such as he had received for years, or remembering the good pastoral times he had upon one in this or that year. I have sometimes wondered what would be the moral effect upon a church community if an old and helpless preacher like William should be sent to it with the understanding that the church should minister to him instead of his ministering to the church; that every saint and sinner should be invited to contribute to his peace and comfort, even as for years he had labored for them. There would be less preaching, of course, but more development in real Christian service. An old preacher treated in this manner would become very dictatorial, a perfect autocrat about ordering charities for the poor and prayers for the penitents, but would it be so bad for the church? However, that was not my consideration now. The Redwine Circuit was only twenty miles distant; the little house between the two green hills that had been the Methodist parsonage thirty years before was long since abandoned for a shiny, green and yellow spindle-legged new parsonage at Royden. And while William, who had always had his home dictated to him by the Conference, showed a pathetic apathy about choosing one for himself, I hankered for the ragged-roof cottage with its ugly old chimneys that had first sheltered our life together. So within a month the horse and buggy were sold, the cottage at Redwine rented, and we settled in it like two crippled birds in a half-feathered nest. Now, for the first time since I left Edenton, a happy, thoughtless bride, I had leisure to think just of ourselves, of our sum total, as it were. And I found that we were two human numerals added together for a lifetime which made a deficit. Yet we had not been idle or indifferent workers. For thirty years William had been in the itinerancy, filling nearly every third and fourth class appointment in his Conference. He had preached over three thousand sermons, baptized more than four hundred infants, received nearly four thousand souls into membership. He had been untiring in his efforts to raise his assessments, and had paid more pastoral calls than half a dozen doctors need to make in order to become famous and wealthy. Time changed us; we grew old. I abandoned my waist-line to Nature's will and my face settled into the expression of a good negative that has been blurred by too long exposure to a strong light. Toward the end William looked like the skin-and-bones remnant of a saint. His face was sunken and hollowed out till the very Wesley in him showed through. His beard was long and had whitened until it gave his Moses head the appearance of coming up out of a holy mist.