Either she changed her seat or she started at the proposal.  But how could she say that she wanted to stay in America with a man who had not said a formal word of love to her?  “I can get ready, I think, papa,” said Esther.

They drove on.  He felt a crawling pain in his heart, for he loved his daughter Esther as he had loved no other child of his; and he knew that he had hurt her.  Naturally, he grew the more angry at the impertinent young man who was the cause of the flitting; for the whole European plan had been cooked up since the receipt of Mrs. Ellis’s letter.  They were on the very street down which he used to walk (for it takes the line of the hills) when he was a poor boy, a struggling, ferociously ambitious young man.  He looked at the changed rows of buildings, and other thoughts came uppermost for a moment.  “It was here father’s church used to stand; it’s gone, now,” he said.  “It was a wood church, painted a kind of gray; mother had a bonnet the same color, and she used to say she matched the church.  I bought it with the very first money I earned.  Part of it came from weeding, and the weather was warm, and I can feel the way my back would sting and creak, now!  I would want to stop, often, but I thought of mother in church with that bonnet, and I kept on!  There’s the place where Seeds, the grocer that used to trust us, had his store; it was his children had the scarlet fever, and mother went to nurse them.  My! but how dismal it was at home!  We always got more whippings when mother was away.  Your grandfather was a good man, too honest for this world, and he loved every one of his seven children; but he brought us up to fear him and the Lord.  We feared him the most, because the Lord couldn’t whip us!  He never whipped us when we did anything, but waited until next day, that he might not punish in anger; so we had all the night to anticipate it.  Did I ever tell you of the time he caught me in a lie?  I was lame for a week after it.  He never caught me in another lie.”

“I think he was cruel; I can’t help it, papa,” cried Esther, with whom this was an old argument, “still it did good, that time!”

“Oh, no, he wasn’t cruel, my dear,” said Armorer, with a queer smile that seemed to take only one-half of his face, not answering the last words; “he was too sure of his interpretation of the Scripture, that was all.  Why, that man just slaved to educate us children; he’d have gone to the stake rejoicing to have made sure that we should be saved.  And of the whole seven only one is a church member.  Is that the road?”

They could see a car swinging past, on a parallel street, its bent pole hitching along the trolley-wire.

“Pretty scrubby-looking cars,” commented Armorer; “but get our new ordinance through the council, we can save enough to afford some fine new cars.  Has Lossing said anything to you about the ordinance and our petition to be allowed to leave off the conductors?”