"A deegnifyin' of the creature above the Creator, the sign above the thing seegnified," Uncle Johnnie Turnbull urged upon the session, smarting from the deep theological wound he had suffered at Jonathan's hands. A perceptible chill crept into the ecclesiastical atmosphere which Marg'et Ann felt without thoroughly comprehending. Nancy Helen was sixteen now, and Marg'et Ann had taught the summer school at Yankee Neck, riding home every evening to superintend the younger sister's housekeeping. Laban had emerged from the period of unshaven awkwardness, and was going to see Emeline Barnes with ominous regularity. There was nothing in the affairs of the household to trouble Marg'et Ann but her father's ever increasing restlessness and preoccupation. She wondered if it would have been different if her mother had lived. There was no great intimacy between the father and daughter, but the girl knew that the wrongs of the black man had risen like a dense cloud between her father and what had once been his highest duty and pleasure. She was not, therefore, greatly surprised when he said to her one day, more humbly than he was wont to speak to his children:-- "I think I must try to do something for those poor people, child; it may not be much, but it will be something. The harvest truly is great, but the laborers are few." "What will you do, father?" Marg'et Ann asked the question hesitatingly, dreading the reply. The minister looked at her with anxious eagerness. He was glad of the humble acquiescence that obliged him to put his half-formed resolution into words. "If the presbytery will release me from my charge here, I may go South for a while. Nancy Helen is quite a girl now, and with Laban and your teaching you could get on. They are bruised for our iniquities, Marg'et Ann,--they are our iniquities, indirectly, child." He got up and walked across the rag-carpeted floor. Marg'et Ann sat still in her mother's chair, looking down at the stripes of the carpet,--dark blue and red and "hit or miss;" her mother had made them so patiently; it seemed as if patience were always under foot for heroism to tread upon. She fought with the ache in her throat a little. The stripes on the floor were beginning to blur when she spoke. "Isn't it dangerous to go down there, father, for people like us,--for Abolitionists, I mean; I have heard that it was." "Dangerous!" The preacher's face lighted with the faint, prophetic joy of martyrdom; poor Marg'et Ann had touched the wrong chord. "It cannot be worse for me than it is for them,--I must go," he broke out impatiently; "do not say anything against it, child!" And so Marg'et Ann said nothing. Really there was not much time for words. There were many stitches to be taken in the threadbare wardrobe, concerning which her father was as ignorant and indifferent as a child, before she packed it all in the old carpet sack and nerved herself to see him start.