Jane looked mystified, but Reuben’s face quivered with pleasure.

“That you are, you blessed child,” he said, and as, hearing the Elder’s step in the hall, she flew out of the room, Reuben covered his eyes with his hand.

Happy years leave slender records; but for suffering and sin there would not be history.  The winter came, and the spring came, and the summer and the autumn, and no face in the quiet little parsonage looked a shade older for the year that had gone; no incident had taken place which could make a salient point in a story, and not one of the peaceful hearts could believe that a twelvemonth had flown.  Elder Kinney’s pathetic fears lest he might love his Saviour less by reason of his new happiness, had melted like frost in early sunlight, in the sweet presence of Draxy’s child-like religion.

“O Draxy!” he said again and again, “seems to me I never half loved all these souls we are working for, before I had you.  I don’t see how I could have been so afraid about it before we were married.”

“Do I really help you, Mr. Kinney?” Draxy would reply, with a lingering emphasis on the “really,” which made her husband draw her closer to him and forget to speak:  “It seems very strange to me that I can.  I feel so ignorant about souls.  It frightens me to answer the smallest question the people ask me.  I never do, in any way except to tell them if I have ever felt so myself, and how God seemed to help me out.”

Blessed Draxy! that was the secret of her influence from first to last:  the magnetic sympathy of a pure and upright soul, to whose rare strength had been added still rarer simplicity and lovingness.  Old and young, men as well as women, came to her with unhesitating confidence.  Before her marriage, they had all felt a little reserve with her, partly because she was of finer grain than they, partly because she had, deep down in her soul, a genuine shyness which showed itself only in quiet reticence.  But now that she was the Elder’s wife, they felt that she was in a measure theirs.  There is a very sweet side, as well as an inconvenient and irritating one, to the old-fashioned rural notion that the parish has almost as much right to the minister’s wife as to the minister.  Draxy saw only the sweet side.  With all the loyalty and directness which had made her, as a little girl, champion and counselor and comfort to her father, she now set her hand to the work of helping her husband do good to the people whom he called his children.

“If they are yours, they must be mine, too, Mr. Kinney,” she would say, with a smile half arch, half solemn.  “I hope I shan’t undo on week-days what you do on Sundays.”