“If you propose to put your picture on her table on Christmas morning, I fear you will be a day late, for Margaret has given up her place, and asked to be allowed to leave to-morrow: she wants to bid Jack good-bye before she goes,” and Mrs. Leslie's voice was iced to twenty degrees below freezing. “What do you mean?” cried Leslie, aghast, for in all his dark imaginations he had never anticipated this catastrophe. “Maggie! our Meg! leaving at a day's notice! It's too absurd! You've... had a quarrel, I suppose, but that won't, come to anything. Christmas is the time for... making up.” “You do not know much about household management, John,” Mrs. Leslie explained with much dignity. “Mistresses don't quarrel with servants, however much provoked they may be. If I have to find fault, I make a rule of doing so quickly and civilly, and I allow no reply. It was Margaret flung up her place with very unbecoming language; and you may be sure this time there will be no 'making up,' as you call it. “What happened, Florence?” said John Leslie, with a note in his voice which a woman never treats with disrespect. “You know I do not interfere between you and the young servants, but Margaret has been with us since we married, and before that was for sixteen years in my father's house. We cannot part lightly; did she speak discourteously to you?” “I do not know what a man may call discourtesy, but Margaret informed me that either she or the housemaid must leave, and that the sooner the housemaid went the better for the house.” “But I thought that the housemaid was a Baptist too, and that Margaret and she got on capitally, and rather looked down on the waitress because she was a Methodist.” “So they did for a time, till they found out that they were different kinds of Baptists, just imagine! They had such arguments in the kitchen that Lucy has had to sit in her pantry, and last evening Margaret called the housemaid a 'contracted Baptist,' and she said Margaret was a 'loose Baptist.' So Margaret told me that if she was a 'loose Baptist,' it was not good for the housemaid to stay in the house with her; and if I preferred a woman like that, she would go at once, and so she is going.” “When men break on theology in the smoking-room,” remarked Leslie, “the wise go to bed at once, and two women--and one of them old Margaret--on the distinctions among the Baptist denomination must be beyond words and endurance. It is natural that places should be given up, but not necessary that the offer should be accepted. What did you say to Margaret, Florence?”