"Hm-m," he mused. "I never thought of that. Harry's the man--not me--if there's anything in being godfather beyond the name. Only Harry jibs at saying 'I will' and 'all this I steadfastly believe'--as if it were for a young donkey like him to criticise the Prayer Book that's been good enough for generations of us. That boy's head is full of maggots. So's Emily's." "I beg," said I, "that you will not say a word against Emily, nor Harry either. They are perfectly right. I think their loyalty beautiful." "To whom?" asked Tom. "To me," I said. "Was it likely they would stand sponsors to the baby over my head? No, they love me too well to countenance anything that would humiliate me. And Tom, my dear, I think it downright tyranny to keep those two dear children hanging on as they are doing, wasting their best years. You forget that I was barely twenty when you married me." "Barely twenty-two," he corrected. "And Emily is twenty-three. You might remember what it was to _us_ to get each other and our little home--how _we_ should have felt if cruel fathers had kept us out of it!" "Well, I never thought to hear myself called a cruel father," laughed Tom, taking everything literally, as usual. "And as for Hal and Emily--why, you yourself----" "I did nothing of the sort," I broke in--for I knew what he was going to say--"and I have always advocated early marriages, because our own was so successful. Now, Tom, when we have settled the affair of the christening--but we must do that first----" "And how's it to be done?" he sighed, heavily. "Good God! I've been true-blue Church and State all my life, but I'm hanged if I don't wish there were no such things as christenings!" I am sure I heartily agreed with him. And after all he had his wish, as far as our baby was concerned. That christening was postponed indefinitely. I heard that Edmund had said, with a man's obtuseness to the logic of the case, that it was better the child should remain a technical sinner than that all its relations should become real ones. I was greatly surprised at the decision, but if they chose to make the poor infant suffer for their faults, it was no concern of mine. Mary Welshman and her husband wanted to make out that it was--this, however, was merely a bit of revenge for some strictures I had passed upon that disreputable brother of hers--and they took upon themselves to such an extent that I resigned my sitting in the church and stopped all my subscriptions. Welshman said that if baby died unbaptized and unregenerate, his eternal damnation would lie at my door--or something to that effect. I was not going to sit under a clergyman who presumed to behave to me in that way.