his wife were too close-fisted and would not spend at all; and at last,
the Man of Wrath explained, the moment having arrived when if he did not
himself appoint somebody his right to do so would lapse, he had written
to the one who was coming, and invited him down that he might look at
him, and ask him searching questions as to the faith which is in him.

I forgot my gloom, and my half-formed desperate resolve to break my vow
of solitude and fill the house with the frivolous, as I sat listening to
the cheerful talk of the little parson this evening. He was so cheerful,
yet it was hard to see any cause for it in the life he was leading, a
life led by the great majority of the German clergy, fat livings being
as rare here as anywhere else. He told us with pleasant frankness all
about himself, how he lived on an income of two thousand marks with a
wife and six children, and how he was often sorely put to it to keep
decent shoes on their feet. "I am continually drawing up plans of
expenditure," he said, "but the shoemaker's bill is always so much more
than I had expected that it throws my calculations completely out."

His wife, of course, was ailing, but already his eldest child, a girl of
ten, took a great deal of the work off her mother's shoulders, poor
baby. He was perfectly natural, and said in the simplest way that if the
choice were to fall on him it would relieve him of many grinding
anxieties; whereupon I privately determined that if the choice did not
fall on him the Man of Wrath and I would be strangers from that hour.

"Have you been worrying him with questions about his principles?" I
asked, buttonholing the Man of Wrath as he came out from a private
conference with him.

"Principles? My dear Elizabeth, how can he have any on that income?"