"Land sakes!" she exclaimed at last with assumed weariness and a whimsical smile, "I didn't know I'd ever come to this; but I guess I'll have to marry you to keep you from makin' another kind of fool of yourself; widowers are such helpless mortals, and you certainly do need a guardian." She shook her head at him despondently. Jonathan advanced towards her deliberately, and clinched the matter: "Well, Hepsey, seein' that we're engaged----" "Engaged? What do you mean? Get away, you----" She rose from her chair in a hurry. "Now Hepsey, a bargain's a bargain: you just said you'd have to marry me, and I guess the sooner you do it and have it over with, the better. So, seein' that we are engaged to be married, as I was about to remark when you interrupted me...." Relentlessly he approached her once more. She retreated a step or two. "Well! Sakes alive, Jonathan! Whatever's come over you to make you so masterful. Well, yes then--I suppose a bargain's a bargain, all right. But before your side of it's paid up you've got to go right over and paint that porch of yours a respectable color." So, for once, Hepsey's strategy had been manipulated to her own defeat: Jonathan went off to town with flying colors, and bought himself a can of pure white paint. [Illustration] CHAPTER XX MUSCULAR CHRISTIANITY It was eleven o'clock at night. Mrs. Betty had retired, while her husband was still struggling to finish a sermon on the importance of foreign missions. Ordinarily, the work would have been congenial and easy for him, because he was an enthusiast in the matter of missionary work: but now for some reason his thoughts were confused; his enthusiasm was lacking, and his pen dragged. He tried hard to pull himself together, but over and over again the question kept repeating itself in his tired brain: Why should the Church support foreign missions, while she lets her hard working clergy at home suffer and half starve in their old age, and even fails to give them decent support while they are working in their prime? Why should a doctor reach his highest professional value at seventy, and a parson be past the "dead-line" at forty-five? Here he was, subject to the caprice and ill-will of a sour and miserly Senior Warden, and a cowed and at least partially "bossed" vestry--and he, the rector, with no practical power of appeal for the enforcement of his legal contract. It was only thanks to Jonathan Jackson, the Junior Warden, that any revenue at all reached him; for Bascom had used every grain of influence he possessed to reduce or stop Maxwell's salary. Mrs. Betty, plucky and cheery though she was, already showed the results of the weary struggle: it was not the work that took the color from her cheeks and the freshness from her face, but the worry incidental to causes which, in any other calling in life but his, would be removable.