The “Reverend” Sage—he was always spoken of as the “Reverend”—was a good-looking young man of thirty, threadbare and a trifle wan, with kindly brown eyes set deep under a broad, intelligent brow. He had a wide, generous mouth and a pleasant smile; a fine nose, a square chin, and a deep, gentle voice. For three years he had been shepherd of the Presbyterians in Rumley, and he was as poor if not actually poorer than the day he came to the town from the theological institute in Chicago. His salary was eight hundred dollars a year, exclusive of “pickings,” as Mr. Baxter called the pitiful extras derived from weddings, funerals and “pound parties.” Come November, there was always a “pound party” for the minister, and it was on such occasions that he received from his flock all sorts and manner of donations. His wife in one of her letters to a girl friend in Chicago mentioned twenty-six pairs of carpet slippers “standing in a row,” seventeen respectfully knitted mufflers, numberless mittens and wristlets, and she couldn’t tell what else until she had gone through all the drawers and closets in the parsonage. Which brings us to the wife, and also to an absolutely unaccountable anomaly. It is not difficult to explain how he came to fall in love with her and why he married her. That might have happened to any man. Likewise it is fairly easy to understand how she came to fall in love with him, for he was dreamy-eyed and reluctant. But how she came to marry him, knowing what it meant to be the wife of an impoverished preacher, is past all understanding. She was a handsome, dashing young woman of twenty-three: the type one meets on the streets of New York or Chicago and is unable to decide whether she is rich or poor, good or bad, idle or industrious, smart or common. Certainly one would never find her counterpart in a town like Rumley except by the accident of importation, and then only as a bird of passage. When she came to Rumley as a bride in the June preceding the birth of Oliver October Baxter, Rumley was aghast. It could not believe its thousand eyes. Small wonder, then, that the precious Mrs. Gooch and her even more precious husband gazed upon her as if their own slightly distended eyes were untrustworthy.