The home-tyrant had gone a step too far.  The meek, patient, long-suffering, much enduring wife, was in no state of mind to bear further encroachments in the direction from which they were now coming.  Suddenly she raised herself up from whence she had fallen across the bed, and looking at her husband with an expression that caused him to step back a pace, involuntarily answered.

“By what authority do you speak to me thus?”

“By the authority vested in me as your husband,” was promptly answered.

“I was on God’s errand, Mr. Howland; searching after the weak, the simple, and the erring!  Have you anything to say against the mission?  Does your authority reach above His?”

And the mother, lifting her hand, pointed trembling finger upward, while she fixed an eye upon her husband so steady that his own sunk beneath its gaze.

For the space of nearly a minute, the attitude of neither changed, nor was the silence broken.  Twice during the time did Mr. Howland lift his eyes to those of his wife, and each time did they fall, after a few moments, under the strange half-defiant look they encountered.  At last he said firmly, yet in a more subdued, though rebuking voice,

“This to me, Esther?”

“Am I not a mother?” was asked in response to this, yet without a perceptible tremor in her voice.

“You are a wife, as well as a mother,” replied Mr. Howland, “and, as a wife, are under a sacred obligation to regard the authority committed to your husband by God.”

“Have I not just said to you,” returned Mrs. Howland, “that I was on God’s errand?  Does your authority go beyond His?”

“When did He speak to you?” There was a covert sneer in the tone with which this half impious interrogation was made.

“I heard his still, small voice in my mother’s heart,” replied Mrs. Howland, meekly, “and I went forth obedient thereto, to seek the straying child you had so harshly and erringly turned from your door:  thus does God shut the door of Heaven against no wandering one who comes to it and knocks for entrance.”

“Esther!  I will not hear such language from your lips!” There was an unsteadiness in the voice of Mr. Howland, that marked the effect his wife’s unexpected and searching words had produced.

“Then do not seek to stand between me and my duty as a mother,” was her firm reply.  “Too long, already, have you placed yourself between me and this duty.  But that time is past.”

As Mrs. Howland uttered these words, she passed across the room to a window, which she threw up, and leaning her body out, looked earnestly up and down the street.  For a reaction like this Mr. Howland was not prepared.  He was, in fact, utterly confounded.  Had there been the smallest sign of irresolution on the part of his wife—­the nearest appearance of weakness in the will so suddenly opposed to his own—­he would have known what to do.  But nothing of this was apparent, and he hesitated about advancing again to the contest, while there was so strong a doubt as to the issue.