He went down the street, humming a cheerful little tune.

To Miss Abigail it was the bugle call of “Forward, charge!” She had been, for the last few weeks, a little paler than usual.  Now her powerful old face flushed to an angry red.  She dashed her trowel to the garden path and clenched her fists.  “What’s coming to Greenford!” she shouted.  It was no longer a wail of despair.  It was a battle-cry of defiance.

II

She had no time to organize a campaign, forced as she was to begin fighting at once.  Reaching wildly for any weapon at hand, she rushed to the front, as grim-visaged a warrior as ever frightened a peaceable, shiftless non-combatant “Joel Barney!” she cried, storming up his front steps.  “You’re a trustee of the church, aren’t you?  Well, if you don’t vote against selling the church, I’ll foreclose the mortgage on your house so quick you can’t wink.  And you tell ’Lias Bennett that if he doesn’t do the same, I’ll pile manure all over that field of mine near his place, and stink out his summer renters so they’ll never set foot here again.”

She shifted tactics as she encountered different adversaries and tried no blackmail on stubborn Miles Benton, whom she took pains to see the next time he came back to Greenford for a visit.  Him she hailed as the Native-Born.  “How would you like to have brazen models and nasty statues made in the building where your own folks have always gone to church?”

But when the skirmish was over, she realized ruefully that the argument which had brought her her hard-won victory had been the one which, for a person of such very moderate means as hers, reflected the least hope for future battles.  At the last, in desperation, she had guaranteed in the name of the Ladies’ Aid Society that the church, except for the minister’s salary, should thereafter be no expense to the trustees.  She had invented that source of authority, remembering that Molly Leonard had said she belonged to the Ladies’ Aid Society, “and I can make Molly do anything,” she thought, trusting Providence for the management of the others.

As a matter of fact, when she came to investigate the matter, she found that Molly was now the sole remaining member.  Her dismay was acute, Molly’s finances being only too well known to her, but she rallied bravely.  “They don’t do much to a church that costs money,” she thought, and, when Molly went away, she made out her budget unflinchingly.  Wood for the furnace, kerosene for the lamps, wages to the janitor, repairs when needed—­“Well, Abigail Warner,” she told herself, “it means nothing new bought for the garden, and no new microscope—­the roof to the library costing more than they said ’twould and all.”

But the joy of triumphant battle was still swelling her doughty old heart, so that even these considerations did not damp her exultation over her artist neighbor the next time he came to see her.  He listened to her boasting with his pleasant, philosophic smile, and, when she finished, delivered himself of a quiet little disquisition or the nature of things which was like ice-water in the face of the hot-blooded old fighter.