“But wouldn’t you have rich men do good with their money?”

“Yes, dear, but I would not have them think they can blot out by their liberality the condemnation of the means by which many of them make money.  That is what they are doing, and the public is getting used to it.”

“Well,” said Margaret, with some warmth, “I don’t know that they are any worse than the stingy saints who have made their money by saving, and act as if they expected to carry it with them.”

“Saints or sinners, it does not make much difference to me,” now put in Mrs. Fletcher, who was evidently considering the question from a practical point of view, “what a man professes, if he founds a hospital for indigent women out of the dividends that I never received.”

Morgan laughed.  “Don’t you think, Mrs. Fletcher, that it is a good sign of the times, that so many people who make money rapidly are disposed to use it philanthropically?”

“It may be for them, but it does not console me much just now.”

“But you don’t make allowance enough for the rich.  Perhaps they are under a necessity of doing something.  I was reading this morning in the diary of old John Ward of Stratford-on-Avon this sentence:  ’It was a saying of Navisson, a lawyer, that no man could be valiant unless he hazarded his body, nor rich unless he hazarded his soul.’”

“Was Navisson a modern lawyer?” I asked.

“No; the diary is dated 1648-1679.”

“I thought so.”

There was a little laugh at this, and the talk drifted off into a consideration of the kind of conscience that enables a professional man to espouse a cause he knows to be wrong as zealously as one he knows to be right; a talk that I should not have remembered at all, except for Margaret’s earnestness in insisting that she did not see how a lawyer could take up the dishonest side.

Before Margaret went to Lenox, Henderson spent a few days with us.  He brought with him the amounding cheerfulness, and the air of a prosperous, smiling world, that attended him in all circumstances.  And how happy Margaret was!  They went over every foot of the ground on which their brief courtship had taken place, and Heaven knows what joy there was to her in reviving all the tenderness and all the fear of it!  Busy as Henderson was, pursued by hourly telegrams and letters, we could not but be gratified that his attention to her was that of a lover.  How could it be otherwise, when all the promise of the girl was realized in the bloom and the exquisite susceptibility of the woman?  Among other things, she dragged him down to her mission in the city, to which he went in a laughing and bantering mood.  When he had gone away, Margaret ran over to my wife, bringing in her hand a slip of paper.

“See that!” she cried, her eyes dancing with pleasure.  It was a check for a thousand dollars.  “That will refurnish the mission from top to bottom,” she said, “and run it for a year.”