“You had much better go to church, —­much better.  But of course your soul is your own,” said Sir Robert.

“You won’t have much body left when you get back:  it is a good twenty miles,” remarked Mr. Ketchum.

“Oh, that is nothing.” replied Mr. Ramsay.

“Forty miles there and back!  Are they crazy?” Mrs. Ketchum asked of Mabel sotto voce; to which a smile and shake of the head came in answer.—­“The day is very damp, Job.  I am almost afraid to go out; but it is my duty, and I will.”

“That’s right, ma.  Do your duty.  It is a good earthly as well as heavenly investment,” replied Mr. Ketchum.

“But I wish, son, that you would live in Kalsing, next to the church, or in New York, which would be better.  I saw a beautiful house advertised in the neighborhood of Trinity Church the other day, and wrote to ask about it,” said Mrs. Ketchum, who was always in spirit moving the family away from Fairfield.

“You are too speculative, ma, entirely,” said he.  “You are like my partner, Richardson, who would write to ask the Czar what he would take for the Winter Palace, if I’d let him, when if steamships were a dollar a dozen he couldn’t put up enough to buy a gang-plank.  I can’t move next to a church, because all you womenites belong to different ones; but I can take a room for you in the steeple and have an elevator put in that will make close connection with the services, if you like.”

“Don’t be irreverent, my son,” said Mrs. Ketchum, who, like some other Protestants, believed in an infallible steeple, if not an infallible Pope.  “I don’t expect my wishes to be considered in anything.”

“Oh, come, now, ma; that isn’t fair.  Except that I married to suit myself, which is about the only foolish thing that I have done, I have been tolerably obedient, I think,” said Mr. Ketchum, aware that he was on dangerous ground.

“Do tell us about it.  You wanted him to marry some one else,—­some one with a fortune, didn’t you?” said Mrs. Sykes.  “Quite natural, I am sure.”

“She wanted me to marry the ugliest woman east of the Rockies,” said Mr. Ketchum.  “But I couldn’t stand that face behind my cups and saucers three hundred and sixty-five days in the year, and I bolted to England, where my wife picked me up.”

“She wasn’t so ugly at all, Job, except that her nose was a little aquiline,” protested Mrs. Ketchum.

“Aquiline as a camel’s back,” asserted her son, in an aside.

“And her hair was rather auburn,” Mrs. Ketchum went on, in reluctant concession.

“Call it pink, as the English do their hunting-coats,” suggested he, smiling.

“But such a dear, good girl, you quite forgot that she wasn’t exactly handsome” ("No, not precisely,” interjected he) “when you came to know her.”

“That I never did.  It might as a speculation have done to get a cast of her face for andirons to keep the American child from falling into the fire; but marry her!  Good Lord!  When I eat anything now that disagrees with me, I dream of Emily’s mouth,” affirmed Mr. Ketchum, with the most laughing mirth in his eyes, his mobile features expressing volumes.