“Now and then, my dear sir, now and then! But I long ago arrived at the conclusion that natural fluency is a lure to indolence. Whatever is worth the hearing should be worth careful preparation. The _vice versa_ occurs to you, of course. I would give my audience ripe matter, the slow accretion of amber-clear thought, not the fervid exudation of momentary excitement. Every line of this morning’s sermon was written out in full. The reporter of a New York paper took it from my hand as I descended from the pulpit. ‘Mr. Wayt!’ he said, ‘that discourse can be printed without the alteration of a word. It is perfect!’” The man’s supreme egotism pushed March into indiscretion, which he afterward considered dishonorable. “You never use the typewriter, then?” “Occasionally,” carelessly. “I might say, semi-occasionally. But not when I am in the Spirit—as I reverently believe I was last night. Mrs. Wayt is a deft operator on it. She learned expressly to copy my sermons and lectures for the press. What will not a good wife do for her husband?” “What, indeed?” assented March fervently. He was thinking of the wifely equivocations to which he had hearkened on the way to church, and, with genuine satisfaction, how straightforward was Hetty’s simple tale of the sermon-writing episode. Again he resolved to tear her out of this web of needless deceits at the earliest possible moment. He left the vicinity of the apple tree, partly to shake off his companion, partly to allow Homer opportunity to escape. Once he had his lips open to intimate his presence in the orchard at midnight, and that he had seen the light in the study. The reverend humbug should be warned of the danger of gratuitous and wholesale lying. He withheld the caution. It was not his province to reprove a man so much his senior, and—he added mentally—such an old offender. Mr. Wayt sauntered on with him to the gate opening into the Gilchrist shrubbery, bade him “good-night,” and marched back. March leaned upon the fence, seeming to stare at the moon, and enjoying a nightcap cigar, until the long, black figure entered the parsonage garden. While the young man lingered he saw Homer drop, monkeylike, to the earth and skulk homeward, keeping in the shadow when he could. “I would sooner take the fool’s chances of evading the devil than his pompous and pious master’s!” soliloquized Mrs. Gilchrist’s son. Hetty was dusting the big parlors next morning, and making ineffectual attempts to evolve coziness out of carpeted space, when a cough at the door attracted her notice.