After a little pause, he tiptoed noiselessly up the side aisle toward the end of the church—toward the light above the gallery. This radiance from a single gas-jet expanded as he advanced, and spread itself upward over a burnished row of monster metal pipes, which went towering into the darkness like giants. They were roaring at him now—a sonorous, deafening, angry bellow, which made everything about him vibrate. The gallery balustrade hid the keyboard and the organist from view. There were only these jostling brazen tubes, as big round as trees and as tall, trembling with their own furious thunder. It was for all the world as if he had wandered into some vast tragical, enchanted cave, and was being drawn against his will—like fascinated bird and python—toward fate at the savage hands of these swollen and enraged genii.

He stumbled in the obscure light over a kneeling-bench, making a considerable racket. On the instant the noise from the organ ceased, and he saw the black figure of a woman rise above the gallery-rail and look down.

"Who is it?" the indubitable voice of Miss Madden demanded sharply.

Theron had a sudden sheepish notion of turning and running. With the best grace he could summon, he called out an explanation instead.

"Wait a minute. I'm through now. I'm coming down," she returned. He thought there was a note of amusement in her tone.

She came to him a moment later, accompanied by a thin, tall man, whom Theron could barely see in the dark, now that the organ-light too was gone. This man lighted a match or two to enable them to make their way out.

When they were on the sidewalk, Celia spoke: "Walk on ahead, Michael!" she said. "I have some matters to speak of with Mr. Ware."



CHAPTER X

"Well, what did you think of Dr. Ledsmar?"

The girl's abrupt question came as a relief to Theron. They were walking along in a darkness so nearly complete that he could see next to nothing of his companion. For some reason, this seemed to suggest a sort of impropriety. He had listened to the footsteps of the man ahead—whom he guessed to be a servant—and pictured him as intent upon getting up early next morning to tell everybody that the Methodist minister had stolen into the Catholic church at night to walk home with Miss Madden. That was going to be very awkward—yes, worse than awkward! It might mean ruin itself. She had mentioned aloud that she had matters to talk over with him: that of course implied confidences, and the man might put heaven only knew what construction on that. It was notorious that servants did ascribe the very worst motives to those they worked for. The bare thought of the delight an Irish servant would have in also dragging a Protestant clergyman into the thing was sickening. And what could she want to talk to him about, anyway? The minute of silence stretched itself out upon his nerves into an interminable period of anxious unhappiness. Her mention of the doctor at last somehow, seemed to lighten the situation.

"Oh, I thought he was very smart." he made haste to answer. "Wouldn't it be better—to—keep close to your man? He—may—think we've gone some other way."

"It wouldn't matter if he did," remarked Celia. She appeared to comprehend his nervousness and take pity on it, for she added, "It is my brother Michael, as good a soul as ever lived. He is quite used to my ways."

The Rev. Mr. Ware drew a long comforting breath. "Oh, I see! He went with you to—bring you home."

"To blow the organ," said the girl in the dark, correctingly. "But about that doctor; did you like him?"

"Well," Theron began, "'like' is rather a strong word for so short an acquaintance. He talked very well; that is, fluently. But he is so different from any other man I have come into contact with that—"

"What I wanted you to say was that you hated him," put in Celia, firmly.

"I don't make a practice of saying that of anybody," returned Theron, so much at his ease again that he put an effect of gentle, smiling reproof into the words. "And why specially should I make an exception for him?"

"Because he's a beast!"

Theron fancied that he understood. "I noticed that he seemed not to have much of an ear for music," he commented, with a little laugh. "He shut down the window when you began to play. His doing so annoyed me, because I—I wanted very much to hear it all. I never heard such music before. I—I came into the church to hear more of it; but then you stopped!"

"I will play for you some other time," Celia said, answering the reproach in his tone. "But tonight I wanted to talk with you instead."

She kept silent, in spite of this, so long now that Theron was on the point of jestingly asking when the talk was to begin. Then she put a question abruptly—

"It is a conventional way of putting it, but are you fond of poetry, Mr. Ware?"

"Well, yes, I suppose I am," replied Theron, much mystified. "I can't say that I am any great judge; but I like the things that I like—and—"

"Meredith," interposed Celia, "makes one of his women, Emilia in England, say that poetry is like talking on tiptoe; like animals in cages, always going to one end and back again. Does it impress you that way?"

"I don't know that it does," said he, dubiously. It seemed, however, to be her whim to talk literature, and he went on: "I've hardly read Meredith at all. I once borrowed his 'Lucile,' but somehow I never got interested in it. I heard a recitation of his once, though—a piece about a dead wife, and the husband and another man quarrelling as to whose portrait was in the locket on her neck, and of their going up to settle the dispute, and finding that it was the likeness of a third man, a young priest—and though it was very striking, it didn't give me a thirst to know his other poems. I fancied I shouldn't like them. But I daresay I was wrong. As I get older, I find that I take less narrow views of literature—that is, of course, of light literature—and that—that—"

Celia mercifully stopped him. "The reason I asked you was—" she began, and then herself paused. "Or no,—never mind that—tell me something else. Are you fond of pictures, statuary, the beautiful things of the world? Do great works of art, the big achievements of the big artists, appeal to you, stir you up?"

"Alas! that is something I can only guess at myself," answered Theron, humbly. "I have always lived in little places. I suppose, from your point of view, I have never seen a good painting in my life. I can only say this, though—that it has always weighed on my mind as a great and sore deprivation, this being shut out from knowing what others mean when they talk and write about art. Perhaps that may help you to get at what you are after. If I ever went to New York, I feel that one of the first things I should do would be to see all the picture galleries; is that what you meant? And—would you mind telling me—why you—?"

"Why I asked you?" Celia supplied his halting question. "No, I DON'T mind. I have a reason for wanting to know—to satisfy myself whether I had guessed rightly or not—about the kind of man you are. I mean in the matter of temperament and bent of mind and tastes."

The girl seemed to be speaking seriously, and without intent to offend. Theron did not find any comment ready, but walked along by her side, wondering much what it was all about.

"I daresay you think me 'too familiar on short acquaintance,'" she continued, after a little.

"My dear Miss Madden!" he protested perfunctorily.

"No; it is a matter of a good deal of importance," she went on. "I can see that you are going to be thrown into friendship, close contact, with Father Forbes. He likes you, and you can't help liking him. There is nobody else in this raw, overgrown, empty-headed place for you and him TO like, nobody except that man, that Dr. Ledsmar. And if you like HIM, I shall hate you! He has done mischief enough already. I am counting on you to help undo it, and to choke him off from doing more. It would be different if you were an ordinary Orthodox minister, all encased like a terrapin in prejudices and nonsense. Of course, if you had been THAT kind, we should never have got to know you at all. But when I saw you in MacEvoy's cottage there, it was plain that you were one of US—I mean a MAN, and not a marionette or a mummy. I am talking very frankly to you, you see. I want you on my side, against that doctor and his heartless, bloodless science."

"I feel myself very heartily on your side," replied Theron. She had set their progress at a slower pace, now that the lights of the main street were drawing near, as if to prolong their talk. All his earlier reservations had fled. It was almost as if she were a parishioner of his own. "I need hardly tell you that the doctor's whole attitude toward—toward revelation—was deeply repugnant to me. It doesn't make it any the less hateful to call it science. I am afraid, though," he went on hesitatingly, "that there are difficulties in the way of my helping, as you call it. You see, the very fact of my being a Methodist minister, and his being a Catholic priest, rather puts my interference out of the question."

"No; that doesn't matter a button," said Celia, lightly. "None of us think of that at all."

"There is the other embarrassment, then," pursued Theron, diffidently, "that Father Forbes is a vastly broader and deeper scholar—in all these matters—than I am. How could I possibly hope to influence him by my poor arguments? I don't know even the alphabet of the language he thinks in—on these subjects, I mean."

"Of course you don't!" interposed the girl, with a confidence which the other, for all his meekness, rather winced under. "That wasn't what I meant at all. We don't want arguments from our friends: we want sympathies, sensibilities, emotional bonds. The right person's silence is worth more for companionship than the wisest talk in the world from anybody else. It isn't your mind that is needed here, or what you know; it is your heart, and what you feel. You are full of poetry, of ideals, of generous, unselfish impulses. You see the human, the warm-blooded side of things. THAT is what is really valuable. THAT is how you can help!"

"You overestimate me sadly," protested Theron, though with considerable tolerance for her error in his tone. "But you ought to tell me something about this Dr. Ledsmar. He spoke of being an old friend of the pr—of Father Forbes."

"Oh, yes, they've always known each other; that is, for many years. They were professors together in a college once, heaven only knows how long ago. Then they separated, I fancy they quarrelled, too, before they parted. The doctor came here, where some relative had left him the place he lives in. Then in time the Bishop chanced to send Father Forbes here—that was about three years ago,—and the two men after a while renewed their old relations. They dine together; that is the doctor's stronghold. He knows more about eating than any other man alive, I believe. He studies it as you would study a language. He has taught old Maggie, at the pastorate there, to cook like the mother of all the Delmonicos. And while they sit and stuff themselves, or loll about afterward like gorged snakes, they think it is smart to laugh at all the sweet and beautiful things in life, and to sneer at people who believe in ideals, and to talk about mankind being merely a fortuitous product of fermentation, and twaddle of that sort. It makes me sick!"

"I can readily see," said Theron, with sympathy, "how such a cold, material, and infidel influence as that must shock and revolt an essentially religious temperament like yours."

Miss Madden looked up at him. They had turned into the main street, and there was light enough for him to detect something startlingly like a grin on her beautiful face.

"But I'm not religious at all, you know," he heard her say. "I'm as Pagan as—anything! Of course there are forms to be observed, and so on; I rather like them than otherwise. I can make them serve very well for my own system; for I am myself, you know, an out-an-out Greek."

"Why, I had supposed that you were full blooded Irish," the Rev. Mr. Ware found himself remarking, and then on the instant was overwhelmed by the consciousness that he had said a foolish thing. Precisely where the folly lay he did not know, but it was impossible to mistake the gesture of annoyance which his companion had instinctively made at his words. She had widened the distance between them now, and quickened her step. They went on in silence till they were within a block of her house. Several people had passed them who Theron felt sure must have recognized them both.

"What I meant was," the girl all at once began, drawing nearer again, and speaking with patient slowness, "that I find myself much more in sympathy with the Greek thought, the Greek theology of the beautiful and the strong, the Greek philosophy of life, and all that, than what is taught nowadays. Personally, I take much more stock in Plato than I do in Peter. But of course it is a wholly personal affair; I had no business to bother you with it. And for that matter, I oughtn't to have troubled you with any of our—"

"I assure you, Miss Madden!" the young minister began, with fervor.

"No," she broke in, in a resigned and even downcast tone; "let it all be as if I hadn't spoken. Don't mind anything I have said. If it is to be, it will be. You can't say more than that, can you?"

She looked into his face again, and her large eyes produced an impression of deep melancholy, which Theron found himself somehow impelled to share. Things seemed all at once to have become very sad indeed.

"It is one of my unhappy nights," she explained, in gloomy confidence. "I get them every once in a while—as if some vicious planet or other was crossing in front of my good star—and then I'm a caution to snakes. I shut myself up—that's the only thing to do—and have it out with myself I didn't know but the organ-music would calm me down, but it hasn't. I shan't sleep a wink tonight, but just rage around from one room to another, piling all the cushions from the divans on to the floor, and then kicking them away again. Do YOU ever have fits like that?"

Theron was able to reply with a good conscience in the negative. It occurred to him to add, with jocose intent: "I am curious to know, do these fits, as you call them, occupy a prominent part in Grecian philosophy as a general rule?"

Celia gave a little snort, which might have signified amusement, but did not speak until they were upon her own sidewalk. "There is my brother, waiting at the gate," she said then, briefly.

"Well, then, I will bid you good-night here, I think," Theron remarked, coming to a halt, and offering his hand. "It must be getting very late, and my—that is—I have to be up particularly early tomorrow. So good-night; I hope you will be feeling ever so much better in spirits in the morning."

"Oh, that doesn't matter," replied the girl, listlessly. "It's a very paltry little affair, this life of ours, at the best of it. Luckily it's soon done with—like a bad dream."

"Tut! Tut! I won't have you talk like that!" interrupted Theron, with a swift and smart assumption of authority. "Such talk isn't sensible, and it isn't good. I have no patience with it!"

"Well, try and have a little patience with ME, anyway, just for tonight," said Celia, taking the reproof with gentlest humility, rather to her censor's surprise. "I really am unhappy tonight, Mr. Ware, very unhappy. It seems as if all at once the world had swelled out in size a thousandfold, and that poor me had dwindled down to the merest wee little red-headed atom—the most helpless and forlorn and lonesome of atoms at that." She seemed to force a sorrowful smile on her face as she added: "But all the same it has done me good to be with you—I am sure it has—and I daresay that by tomorrow I shall be quite out of the blues. Good-night, Mr. Ware. Forgive my making such an exhibition of myself I WAS going to be such a fine early Greek, you know, and I have turned out only a late Milesian—quite of the decadence. I shall do better next time. And good-night again, and ever so many thanks."

She was walking briskly away toward the gate now, where the shadowy Michael still patiently stood. Theron strode off in the opposite direction, taking long, deliberate steps, and bowing his head in thought. He had his hands behind his back, as was his wont, and the sense of their recent contact with her firm, ungloved hands was, curiously enough, the thing which pushed itself uppermost in his mind. There had been a frank, almost manly vigor in her grasp; he said to himself that of course that came from her playing so much on the keyboard; the exercise naturally would give her large, robust hands.

Suddenly he remembered about the piano; he had quite forgotten to solicit her aid in selecting it. He turned, upon the impulse, to go back. She had not entered the gate as yet, but stood, shiningly visible under the street lamp, on the sidewalk, and she was looking in his direction. He turned again like a shot, and started homeward.

The front door of the parsonage was unlocked, and he made his way on tiptoe through the unlighted hall to the living-room. The stuffy air here was almost suffocating with the evil smell of a kerosene lamp turned down too low. Alice sat asleep in her old farmhouse rocking-chair, with an inelegant darning-basket on the table by her side. The whole effect of the room was as bare and squalid to Theron's newly informed eye as the atmosphere was offensive to his nostrils. He coughed sharply, and his wife sat up and looked at the clock. It was after eleven.

"Where on earth have you been?" she asked, with a yawn, turning up the wick of her sewing-lamp again.

"You ought never to turn down a light like that," said Theron, with a complaining note in his voice. "It smells up the whole place. I never dreamed of your sitting up for me like this. You ought to have gone to bed."

"But how could I guess that you were going to be so late?," she retorted. "And you haven't told me where you were. Is this book of yours going to keep you up like this right along?"

The episode of the book was buried in the young minister's mind beneath such a mass of subsequent experiences that it required an effort for him to grasp what she was talking about. It seemed as if months had elapsed since he was in earnest about that book; and yet he had left the house full of it only a few hours before. He shook his wits together, and made answer—

"Oh, bless you, no! Only there arose a very curious question. You have no idea, literally no conception, of the interesting and important problems which are raised by the mere fact of Abraham leaving the city of Ur. It's amazing, I assure you. I hadn't realized it myself."

"Well," remarked Alice, rising—and with good-humor and petulance struggling sleepily ill her tone—"all I've got to say is, that if Abraham hasn't anything better to do than to keep young ministers of the gospel out, goodness knows where, till all hours of the night, I wish to gracious he'd stayed in the city of Ur right straight along."

"You have no idea what a scholarly man Dr. Ledsmar is," Theron suddenly found himself inspired to volunteer. "He has the most marvellous collection of books—a whole library devoted to this very subject—and he has put them all quite freely at my disposal. Extremely kind of him, isn't it?"

"Ledsmar? Ledsmar?" queried Alice. "I don't seem to remember the name. He isn't the little man with the birthmark, who sits in the pew behind the Lovejoys, is he? I think some one said he was a doctor."

"Yes, a horse doctor!" said Theron, with a sniff. "No; you haven't seen this Dr. Ledsmar at all. I—I don't know that he attends any church regularly. I scraped his acquaintance quite by accident. He is really a character. He lives in the big house, just beyond the race-course, you know—the one with the tower at the back—"

"No, I don't know. How should I? I've hardly poked my nose outside of the yard since I have been here."

"Well, you shall go," said the husband, consolingly. "You HAVE been cooped up here too much, poor girl. I must take you out more, really. I don't know that I could take you to the doctor's place—without an invitation, I mean. He is very queer about some things. He lives there all alone, for instance, with only a Chinaman for a servant. He told me I was almost the only man he had asked under his roof for years. He isn't a practising physician at all, you know. He is a scientist; he makes experiments with lizards—and things."

"Theron," the wife said, pausing lamp in hand on her way to the bedroom, "do you be careful, now! For all you know this doctor may be a loose man, or pretty near an infidel. You've got to be mighty particular in such matters, you know, or you'll have the trustees down on you like a 'thousand of bricks.'"

"I will thank the trustees to mind their own business," said Theron, stiffly, and the subject dropped.

The bedroom window upstairs was open, and upon the fresh night air was borne in the shrill, jangling sound of a piano, being played off somewhere in the distance, but so vehemently that the noise imposed itself upon the silence far and wide. Theron listened to this as he undressed. It proceeded from the direction of the main street, and he knew, as by instinct, that it was the Madden girl who was playing. The incongruity of the hour escaped his notice. He mused instead upon the wild and tropical tangle of moods, emotions, passions, which had grown up in that strange temperament. He found something very pathetic in that picture she had drawn of herself in forecast, roaming disconsolate through her rooms the livelong night, unable to sleep. The woful moan of insomnia seemed to make itself heard in every strain from her piano.

Alice heard it also, but being unillumined, she missed the romantic pathos. "I call it disgraceful," she muttered from her pillow, "for folks to be banging away on a piano at this time of night. There ought to be a law to prevent it."

"It may be some distressed soul," said Theron, gently, "seeking relief from the curse of sleeplessness."

The wife laughed, almost contemptuously. "Distressed fiddlesticks!" was her only other comment.

The music went on for a long time—rising now to strident heights, now sinking off to the merest tinkling murmur, and broken ever and again by intervals of utter hush. It did not prevent Alice from at once falling sound asleep; but Theron lay awake, it seemed to him, for hours, listening tranquilly, and letting his mind wander at will through the pleasant antechambers of Sleep, where are more unreal fantasies than Dreamland itself affords.



PART II



CHAPTER XI

For some weeks the Rev. Theron Ware saw nothing of either the priest or the doctor, or the interesting Miss Madden.

There were, indeed, more urgent matters to think about. June had come; and every succeeding day brought closer to hand the ordeal of his first Quarterly Conference in Octavius. The waters grew distinctly rougher as his pastoral bark neared this difficult passage.

He would have approached the great event with an easier mind if he could have made out just how he stood with his congregation. Unfortunately nothing in his previous experiences helped him in the least to measure or guess at the feelings of these curious Octavians. Their Methodism seemed to be sound enough, and to stick quite to the letter of the Discipline, so long as it was expressed in formulae. It was its spirit which he felt to be complicated by all sorts of conditions wholly novel to him.

The existence of a line of street-cars in the town, for example, would not impress the casual thinker as likely to prove a rock in the path of peaceful religion. Theron, in his simplicity, had even thought, when he first saw these bobtailed cars bumping along the rails in the middle of the main street, that they must be a great convenience to people living in the outskirts, who wished to get in to church of a Sunday morning. He was imprudent enough to mention this in conversation with one of his new parishioners. Then he learned, to his considerable chagrin, that when this line was built, some years before, a bitter war of words had been fought upon the question of its being worked on the Sabbath day. The then occupant of the Methodist pulpit had so distinguished himself above the rest by the solemnity and fervor of his protests against this insolent desecration of God's day that the Methodists of Octavius still felt themselves peculiarly bound to hold this horse-car line, its management, and everything connected with it, in unbending aversion. At least once a year they were accustomed to expect a sermon denouncing it and all its impious Sunday patrons. Theron made a mental resolve that this year they should be disappointed.

Another burning problem, which he had not been called upon before to confront, he found now entangled with the mysterious line which divided a circus from a menagerie. Those itinerant tent-shows had never come his way heretofore, and he knew nothing of that fine balancing proportion between ladies in tights on horseback and cages full of deeply educational animals, which, even as the impartial rain, was designed to embrace alike the just and the unjust. There had arisen inside the Methodist society of Octavius some painful episodes, connected with members who took their children "just to see the animals," and were convicted of having also watched the Rose-Queen of the Arena, in her unequalled flying leap through eight hoops, with an ardent and unashamed eye. One of these cases still remained on the censorial docket of the church; and Theron understood that he was expected to name a committee of five to examine and try it. This he neglected to do.

He was no longer at all certain that the congregation as a whole liked his sermons. The truth was, no doubt, that he had learned enough to cease regarding the congregation as a whole. He could still rely upon carrying along with him in his discourses from the pulpit a large majority of interested and approving faces. But here, unhappily, was a case where the majority did not rule. The minority, relatively small in numbers, was prodigious in virile force.

More than twenty years had now elapsed since that minor schism in the Methodist Episcopal Church, the result of which was the independent body known as Free Methodists, had relieved the parent flock of its principal disturbing element. The rupture came fittingly at that time when all the "isms" of the argumentative fifties were hurled violently together into the melting-pot of civil war. The great Methodist Church, South, had broken bodily off on the question of State Rights. The smaller and domestic fraction of Free Methodism separated itself upon an issue which may be most readily described as one of civilization. The seceders resented growth in material prosperity; they repudiated the introduction of written sermons and organ-music; they deplored the increasing laxity in meddlesome piety, the introduction of polite manners in the pulpit and classroom, and the development of even a rudimentary desire among the younger people of the church to be like others outside in dress and speech and deportment. They did battle as long as they could, inside the fold, to restore it to the severely straight and narrow path of primitive Methodism. When the adverse odds became too strong for them, they quitted the church and set up a Bethel for themselves.

Octavius chanced to be one of the places where they were able to hold their own within the church organization. The Methodism of the town had gone along without any local secession. It still held in full fellowship the radicals who elsewhere had followed their unbridled bent into the strongest emotional vagaries—where excited brethren worked themselves up into epileptic fits, and women whirled themselves about in weird religious ecstasies, like dervishes of the Orient, till they fell headlong in a state of trance. Octavian Methodism was spared extravagances of this sort, it is true, but it paid a price for the immunity. The people whom an open split would have taken away remained to leaven and dominate the whole lump. This small advanced section, with its men of a type all the more aggressive from its narrowness, and women who went about solemnly in plain gray garments, with tight-fitting, unadorned, mouse-colored sunbonnets, had not been able wholly to enforce its views upon the social life of the church members, but of its controlling influence upon their official and public actions there could be no doubt.

The situation had begun to unfold itself to Theron from the outset. He had recognized the episodes of the forbidden Sunday milk and of the flowers in poor Alice's bonnet as typical of much more that was to come. No week followed without bringing some new fulfilment of this foreboding. Now, at the end of two months, he knew well enough that the hitherto dominant minority was hostile to him and his ministry, and would do whatever it could against him.

Though Theron at once decided to show fight, and did not at all waver in that resolve, his courage was in the main of a despondent sort. Sometimes it would flutter up to the point of confidence, or at least hopefulness, when he met with substantial men of the church who obviously liked him, and whom he found himself mentally ranging on his side, in the struggle which was to come. But more often it was blankly apparent to him that, the moment flags were flying and drums on the roll, these amiable fair-weather friends would probably take to their heels.

Still, such as they were, his sole hope lay in their support. He must make the best of them. He set himself doggedly to the task of gathering together all those who were not his enemies into what, when the proper time came, should be known as the pastor's party. There was plenty of apostolic warrant for this. If there had not been, Theron felt that the mere elementary demands of self-defence would have justified his use of strategy.

The institution of pastoral calling, particularly that inquisitorial form of it laid down in the Discipline, had never attracted Theron. He and Alice had gone about among their previous flocks in quite a haphazard fashion, without thought of system, much less of deliberate purpose. Theron made lists now, and devoted thought and examination to the personal tastes and characteristics of the people to be cultivated. There were some, for example, who would expect him to talk pretty much as the Discipline ordained—that is, to ask if they had family prayer, to inquire after their souls, and generally to minister grace to his hearers—and these in turn subdivided themselves into classes, ranging from those who would wish nothing else to those who needed only a mild spiritual flavor. There were others whom he would please much better by not talking shop at all. Although he could ill afford it, he subscribed now for a daily paper that he might have a perpetually renewed source of good conversational topics for these more worldly calls. He also bought several pounds of candy, pleasing in color, but warranted to be entirely harmless, and he made a large mysterious mark on the inside of his new silk hat to remind him not to go out calling without some of this in his pocket for the children.

Alice, he felt, was not helping him in this matter as effectively as he could have wished. Her attitude toward the church in Octavius might best be described by the word "sulky." Great allowance was to be made, he realized, for her humiliation over the flowers in her bonnet. That might justify her, fairly enough, in being kept away from meeting now and again by headaches, or undefined megrims. But it ought not to prevent her from going about and making friends among the kindlier parishioners who would welcome such a thing, and whom he from time to time indicated to her. She did go to some extent, it is true, but she produced, in doing so, an effect of performing a duty. He did not find traces anywhere of her having created a brilliant social impression. When they went out together, he was peculiarly conscious of having to do the work unaided.

This was not at all like the Alice of former years, of other charges. Why, she had been, beyond comparison, the most popular young woman in Tyre. What possessed her to mope like this in Octavius?

Theron looked at her attentively nowadays, when she was unaware of his gaze, to try if her face offered any answer to the riddle. It could not be suggested that she was ill. Never in her life had she been looking so well. She had thrown herself, all at once, and with what was to him an unaccountable energy, into the creation and management of a flower-garden. She was out the better part of every day, rain or shine, digging, transplanting, pruning, pottering generally about among her plants and shrubs. This work in the open air had given her an aspect of physical well-being which it was impossible to be mistaken about.

Her husband was glad, of course, that she had found some occupation which at once pleased her and so obviously conduced to health. This was so much a matter of course, in fact, that he said to himself over and over again that he was glad. Only—only, sometimes the thought WOULD force itself upon his attention that if she did not spend so much of her time in her own garden, she would have more time to devote to winning friends for them in the Garden of the Lord—friends whom they were going to need badly.

The young minister, in taking anxious stock of the chances for and against him, turned over often in his mind the fact that he had already won rank as a pulpit orator. His sermons had attracted almost universal attention at Tyre, and his achievement before the Conference at Tecumseh, if it did fail to receive practical reward, had admittedly distanced all the other preaching there. It was a part of the evil luck pursuing him that here in this perversely enigmatic Octavius his special gift seemed to be of no use whatever. There were times, indeed, when he was tempted to think that bad preaching was what Octavius wanted.

Somewhere he had heard of a Presbyterian minister, in charge of a big city church, who managed to keep well in with a watchfully Orthodox congregation, and at the same time establish himself in the affections of the community at large, by simply preaching two kinds of sermons. In the morning, when almost all who attended were his own communicants, he gave them very cautious and edifying doctrinal discourses, treading loyally in the path of the Westminster Confession. To the evening assemblages, made up for the larger part of outsiders, he addressed broadly liberal sermons, literary in form, and full of respectful allusions to modern science and the philosophy of the day. Thus he filled the church at both services, and put money in its treasury and his own fame before the world. There was of course the obvious danger that the pious elders who in the forenoon heard infant damnation vigorously proclaimed, would revolt when they heard after supper that there was some doubt about even adults being damned at all. But either because the same people did not attend both services, or because the minister's perfect regularity in the morning was each week regarded as a retraction of his latest vagaries of an evening, no trouble ever came.

Theron had somewhat tentatively tried this on in Octavius. It was no good. His parishioners were of the sort who would have come to church eight times a day on Sunday, instead of two, if occasion offered. The hope that even a portion of them would stop away, and that their places would be taken in the evening by less prejudiced strangers who wished for intellectual rather than theological food, fell by the wayside. The yearned-for strangers did not come; the familiar faces of the morning service all turned up in their accustomed places every evening. They were faces which confused and disheartened Theron in the daytime. Under the gaslight they seemed even harder and more unsympathetic. He timorously experimented with them for an evening or two, then abandoned the effort.

Once there had seemed the beginning of a chance. The richest banker in Octavius—a fat, sensual, hog-faced old bachelor—surprised everybody one evening by entering the church and taking a seat. Theron happened to know who he was; even if he had not known, the suppressed excitement visible in the congregation, the way the sisters turned round to look, the way the more important brethren put their heads together and exchanged furtive whispers—would have warned him that big game was in view. He recalled afterward with something like self-disgust the eager, almost tremulous pains he himself took to please this banker. There was a part of the sermon, as it had been written out, which might easily give offence to a single man of wealth and free notions of life. With the alertness of a mental gymnast, Theron ran ahead, excised this portion, and had ready when the gap was reached some very pretty general remarks, all the more effective and eloquent, he felt, for having been extemporized. People said it was a good sermon; and after the benediction and dispersion some of the officials and principal pew-holders remained to talk over the likelihood of a capture having been effected. Theron did not get away without having this mentioned to him, and he was conscious of sharing deeply the hope of the brethren—with the added reflection that it would be a personal triumph for himself into the bargain. He was ashamed of this feeling a little later, and of his trick with the sermon. But this chastening product of introspection was all the fruit which the incident bore. The banker never came again.

Theron returned one afternoon, a little earlier than usual, from a group of pastoral calls. Alice, who was plucking weeds in a border at the shady side of the house, heard his step, and rose from her labors. He was walking slowly, and seemed weary. He took off his high hat, as he saw her, and wiped his brow. The broiling June sun was still high overhead. Doubtless it was its insufferable heat which was accountable for the worn lines in his face and the spiritless air which the wife's eye detected. She went to the gate, and kissed him as he entered.

"I believe if I were you," she said, "I'd carry an umbrella such scorching days as this. Nobody'd think anything of it. I don't see why a minister shouldn't carry one as much as a woman carries a parasol."

Theron gave her a rueful, meditative sort of smile. "I suppose people really do think of us as a kind of hybrid female," he remarked. Then, holding his hat in his hand, he drew a long breath of relief at finding himself in the shade, and looked about him.

"Why, you've got more posies here, on this one side of the house alone, than mother had in her whole yard," he said, after a little. "Let's see—I know that one: that's columbine, isn't it? And that's London pride, and that's ragged robin. I don't know any of the others."

Alice recited various unfamiliar names, as she pointed out the several plants which bore them, and he listened with a kindly semblance of interest.

They strolled thus to the rear of the house, where thick clumps of fragrant pinks lined both sides of the path. She picked some of these for him, and gave him more names with which to label the considerable number of other plants he saw about him.

"I had no idea we were so well provided as all this," he commented at last. "Those Van Sizers must have been tremendous hands for flowers. You were lucky in following such people."

"Van Sizers!" echoed Alice, with contempt. "All they left was old tomato cans and clamshells. Why, I've put in every blessed one of these myself, all except those peonies, there, and one brier on the side wall."

"Good for you!" exclaimed Theron, approvingly. Then it occurred to him to ask, "But where did you get them all? Around among our friends?"

"Some few," responded Alice, with a note of hesitation in her voice. "Sister Bult gave me the verbenas, there, and the white pinks were a present from Miss Stevens. But most of them Levi Gorringe was good enough to send me—from his garden."

"I didn't know that Gorringe had a garden," said Theron. "I thought he lived over his law-office, in the brick block, there."

"Well, I don't know that it's exactly HIS," explained Alice; "but it's a big garden somewhere outside, where he can have anything he likes." She went on with a little laugh: "I didn't like to question him too closely, for fear he'd think I was looking a gift horse in the mouth—or else hinting for more. It was quite his own offer, you know. He picked them all out for me, and brought them here, and lent me a book telling me just what to do with each one. And in a few days, now, I am to have another big batch of plants—dahlias and zinnias and asters and so on; I'm almost ashamed to take them. But it's such a change to find some one in this Octavius who isn't all self!"

"Yes, Gorringe is a good fellow," said Theron. "I wish he was a professing member." Then some new thought struck him. "Alice," he exclaimed, "I believe I'll go and see him this very afternoon. I don't know why it hasn't occurred to me before: he's just the man whose advice I need most. He knows these people here; he can tell me what to do."

"Aren't you too tired now?" suggested Alice, as Theron put on his hat.

"No, the sooner the better," he replied, moving now toward the gate.

"Well," she began, "if I were you, I wouldn't say too much about—that is, I—but never mind."

"What is it?" asked her husband.

"Nothing whatever," replied Alice, positively. "It was only some nonsense of mine;" and Theron, placidly accepting the feminine whim, went off down the street again.



CHAPTER XII

The Rev. Mr. Ware found Levi Gorringe's law-office readily enough, but its owner was not in. He probably would be back again, though, in a quarter of an hour or so, the boy said, and the minister at once decided to wait.

Theron was interested in finding that this office-boy was no other than Harvey—the lad who brought milk to the parsonage every morning. He remembered now that he had heard good things of this urchin, as to the hard work he did to help his mother, the Widow Semple, in her struggle to keep a roof over her head; and also bad things, in that he did not come regularly either to church or Sunday-school. The clergyman recalled, too, that Harvey had impressed him as a character.

"Well, sonny, are you going to be a lawyer?" he asked, as he seated himself by the window, and looked about him, first at the dusty litter of old papers, pamphlets, and tape-bound documents in bundles which crowded the stuffy chamber, and then at the boy himself.

Harvey was busy at a big box—a rough pine dry-goods box which bore the flaring label of an express company, and also of a well-known seed firm in a Western city, and which the boy had apparently just opened. He was lifting from it, and placing on the table after he had shaken off the sawdust and moss in which they were packed, small parcels of what looked in the fading light to be half-dried plants.

"Well, I don't know—I rather guess not," he made answer, as he pursued his task. "So far as I can make out, this wouldn't be the place to start in at, if I WAS going to be a lawyer. A boy can learn here first-rate how to load cartridges and clean a gun, and braid trout-flies on to leaders, but I don't see much law laying around loose. Anyway," he went on, "I couldn't afford to read law, and not be getting any wages. I have to earn money, you know."

Theron felt that he liked the boy. "Yes," he said, with a kindly tone; "I've heard that you are a good, industrious youngster. I daresay Mr. Gorringe will see to it that you get a chance to read law, and get wages too."

"Oh, I can read all there is here and welcome," the boy explained, stepping toward the window to decipher the label on a bundle of roots in his hand, "but that's no good unless there's regular practice coming into the office all the while. THAT'S how you learn to be a lawyer. But Gorringe don't have what I call a practice at all. He just sees men in the other room there, with the door shut, and whatever there is to do he does it all himself."

The minister remembered a stray hint somewhere that Mr. Gorringe was a money-lender—what was colloquially called a "note-shaver." To his rustic sense, there was something not quite nice about that occupation. It would be indecorous, he felt, to encourage further talk about it from the boy.

"What are you doing there?" he inquired, to change the subject.

"Sorting out some plants," replied Harvey. "I don't know what's got into Gorringe lately. This is the third big box he's had since I've been here—that is, in six weeks—besides two baskets full of rose-bushes. I don't know what he does with them. He carries them off himself somewhere. I've had kind of half a notion that he's figurin' on getting married. I can't think of anything else that would make a man spend money like water—just for flowers and bushes. They do get foolish, you know, when they've got marriage on the brain."

Theron found himself only imperfectly following the theories of the young philosopher. It was his fact that monopolized the minister's attention.

"But as I understand it," he remarked hesitatingly, "Brother Gorringe—or rather Mr. Gorringe—gets all the plants he wants, everything he likes, from a big garden somewhere outside. I don't know that it is exactly his; but I remember hearing something to that effect."

The boy slapped the last litter off his hands, and, as he came to the window, shook his head. "These don't come from no garden outside," he declared. "They come from the dealers', and he pays solid cash for 'em. The invoice for this lot alone was thirty-one dollars and sixty cents. There it is on the table. You can see it for yourself."

Mr. Ware did not offer to look. "Very likely these are for the garden I was speaking of," he said. "Of course you can't go on taking plants out of a garden indefinitely without putting others in."

"I don't know anything about any garden that he takes plants out of," answered Harvey, and looked meditatively for a minute or two out upon the street below. Then he turned to the minister. "Your wife's doing a good deal of gardening this spring, I notice," he said casually. "You'd hardly think it was the same place, she's fixed it up so. If she wants any extra hoeing done, I can always get off Saturday afternoons."

"I will remember," said Theron. He also looked out of the window; and nothing more was said until, a few moments later, Mr. Gorringe himself came in.

The lawyer seemed both surprised and pleased at discovering the identity of his visitor, with whom he shook hands in almost an excess of cordiality. He spread a large newspaper over the pile of seedling plants on the table, pushed the packing-box under the table with his foot, and said almost peremptorily to the boy, "You can go now!" Then he turned again to Theron.

"Well, Mr. Ware, I'm glad to see you," he repeated, and drew up a chair by the window. "Things are going all right with you, I hope."

Theron noted again the waving black hair, the dark skin, and the carefully trimmed mustache and chin-tuft which gave the lawyer's face a combined effect of romance and smartness. No; it was the eyes, cool, shrewd, dark-gray eyes, which suggested this latter quality. The recollection of having seen one of them wink, in deliberate hostility of sarcasm, when those other trustees had their backs turned, came mercifully at the moment to recall the young minister to his errand.

"I thought I would drop in and have a chat with you," he said, getting better under way as he went on. "Quarterly Conference is only a fortnight off, and I am a good deal at sea about what is going to happen."

"I'm not a church member, you know," interposed Gorringe. "That shuts me out of the Quarterly Conference."

"Alas, yes!" said Theron. "I wish it didn't. I'm afraid I'm not going to have any friends to spare there."

"What are you afraid of?" asked the lawyer, seeming now to be wholly at his ease again "They can't eat you."

"No, they keep me too lean for that," responded Theron, with a pensive smile. "I WAS going to ask, you know, for an increase of salary, or an extra allowance. I don't see how I can go on as it is. The sum fixed by the last Quarterly Conference of the old year, and which I am getting now, is one hundred dollars less than my predecessor had. That isn't fair, and it isn't right. But so far from its looking as if I could get an increase, the prospect seems rather that they will make me pay for the gas and that sidewalk. I never recovered more than about half of my moving expenses, as you know, and—and, frankly, I don't know which way to turn. It keeps me miserable all the while."

"That's where you're wrong," said Mr. Gorringe. "If you let things like that worry you, you'll keep a sore skin all your life. You take my advice and just go ahead your own gait, and let other folks do the worrying. They ARE pretty close-fisted here, for a fact, but you can manage to rub along somehow. If you should get into any real difficulties, why, I guess—" the lawyer paused to smile in a hesitating, significant way—"I guess some road out can be found all right. The main thing is, don't fret, and don't allow your wife to—to fret either."

He stopped abruptly. Theron nodded in recognition of his amiable tone, and the found the nod lengthening itself out into almost a bow as the thought spread through his mind that this had been nothing more nor less than a promise to help him with money if worst came to worst. He looked at Levi Gorringe, and said to himself that the intuition of women was wonderful. Alice had picked him out as a friend of theirs merely by seeing him pass the house.

"Yes," he said; "I am specially anxious to keep my wife from worrying. She was surrounded in her girlhood by a good deal of what, relatively, we should call luxury, and that makes it all the harder for her to be a poor minister's wife. I had quite decided to get her a hired girl, come what might, but she thinks she'd rather get on without one. Her health is better, I must admit, than it was when we came here. She works out in her garden a great deal, and that seems to agree with her."

"Octavius is a healthy place—that's generally admitted," replied the lawyer, with indifference. He seemed not to be interested in Mrs. Ware's health, but looked intently out through the window at the buildings opposite, and drummed with his fingers on the arms of his chair.

Theron made haste to revert to his errand. "Of course, your not being in the Quarterly Conference," he said, "renders certain things impossible. But I didn't know but you might have some knowledge of how matters are going, what plans the officials of the church had; they seem to have agreed to tell me nothing."

"Well, I HAVE heard this much," responded Gorringe. "They're figuring on getting the Soulsbys here to raise the debt and kind o' shake things up generally. I guess that's about as good as settled. Hadn't you heard of it?"

"Not a breath!" exclaimed Theron, mournfully. "Well," he added upon reflection, "I'm sorry, downright sorry. The debt-raiser seems to me about the lowest-down thing we produce. I've heard of those Soulsbys; I think I saw HIM indeed once at Conference, but I believe SHE is the head of the firm."

"Yes; she wears the breeches, I understand," said Gorringe sententiously.

"I HAD hoped," the young minister began with a rueful sigh, "in fact, I felt quite confident at the outset that I could pay off this debt, and put the church generally on a new footing, by giving extra attention to my pulpit work. It is hardly for me to say it, but in other places where I have been, my preaching has been rather—rather a feature in the town itself I have always been accustomed to attract to our services a good many non-members, and that, as you know, helps tremendously from a money point of view. But somehow that has failed here. I doubt if the average congregations are a whit larger now than they were when I came in April. I know the collections are not."

"No," commented the lawyer, slowly; "you'll never do anything in that line in Octavius. You might, of course, if you were to stay here and work hard at it for five or six years—"

"Heaven forbid!" groaned Mr. Ware.

"Quite so," put in the other. "The point is that the Methodists here are a little set by themselves. I don't know that they like one another specially, but I do know that they are not what you might call popular with people outside. Now, a new preacher at the Presbyterian church, or even the Baptist—he might have a chance to create talk, and make a stir. But Methodist—no! People who don't belong won't come near the Methodist church here so long as there's any other place with a roof on it to go to. Give a dog a bad name, you know. Well, the Methodists here have got a bad name; and if you could preach like Henry Ward Beecher himself you wouldn't change it, or get folks to come and hear you."

"I see what you mean," Theron responded. "I'm not particularly surprised myself that Octavius doesn't love us, or look to us for intellectual stimulation. I myself leave that pulpit more often than otherwise feeling like a wet rag—utterly limp and discouraged. But, if you don't mind my speaking of it, YOU don't belong, and yet YOU come."

It was evident that the lawyer did not mind. He spoke freely in reply. "Oh, yes, I've got into the habit of it. I began going when I first came here, and—and so it grew to be natural for me to go. Then, of course, being the only lawyer you have, a considerable amount of my business is mixed up in one way or another with your membership; you see those are really the things which settle a man in a rut, and keep him there."

"I suppose your people were Methodists," said Theron, to fill in the pause, "and that is how you originally started with us."

Levi Gorringe shook his head. He leaned back, half closed his eyes, put his finger-tips together, and almost smiled as if something in retrospect pleased and moved him.

"No," he said; "I went to the church first to see a girl who used to go there. It was long before your time. All her family moved away years ago. You wouldn't know any of them. I was younger then, and I didn't know as much as I do now. I worshipped the very ground that girl walked on, and like a fool I never gave her so much as a hint of it. Looking back now, I can see that I might have had her if I'd asked her. But I went instead and sat around and looked at her at church and Sunday-school and prayer-meetings Thursday nights, and class-meetings after the sermon. She was devoted to religion and church work; and, thinking it would please her, I joined the church on probation. Men can fool themselves easier than they can other people. I actually believed at the time that I had experienced religion. I felt myself full of all sorts of awakenings of the soul and so forth. But it was really that girl. You see I'm telling you the thing just as it was. I was very happy. I think it was the happiest time of my life. I remember there was a love-feast while I was on probation; and I sat down in front, right beside her, and we ate the little square chunks of bread and drank the water together, and I held one corner of her hymn-book when we stood up and sang. That was the nearest I ever got to her, or to full membership in the church. That very next week, I think it was, we learned that she had got engaged to the minister's son—a young man who had just become a minister himself. They got married, and went away—and I—somehow I never took up my membership when the six months' probation was over. That's how it was."

"It is very interesting," remarked Theron, softly, after a little silence—"and very full of human nature."

"Well, now you see," said the lawyer, "what I mean when I say that there hasn't been another minister here since, that I should have felt like telling this story to. They wouldn't have understood it at all. They would have thought it was blasphemy for me to say straight out that what I took for experiencing religion was really a girl. But you are different. I felt that at once, the first time I saw you. In a pulpit or out of it, what I like in a human being is that he SHOULD be human."

"It pleases me beyond measure that you should like me, then" returned the young minister, with frank gratification shining on his face. "The world is made all the sweeter and more lovable by these—these elements of romance. I am not one of those who would wish to see them banished or frowned upon. I don't mind admitting to you that there is a good deal in Methodism—I mean the strict practice of its letter which you find here in Octavius—that is personally distasteful to me. I read the other day of an English bishop who said boldly, publicly, that no modern nation could practise the principles laid down in the Sermon on the Mount and survive for twenty-four hours."

"Ha, ha! That's good!" laughed the lawyer.

"I felt that it was good, too," pursued Theron. "I am getting to see a great many things differently, here in Octavius. Our Methodist Discipline is like the Beatitudes—very helpful and beautiful, if treated as spiritual suggestion, but more or less of a stumbling-block if insisted upon literally. I declare!" he added, sitting up in his chair, "I never talked like this to a living soul before in all my life. Your confidences were contagious."

The Rev. Mr. Ware rose as he spoke, and took up his hat.

"Must you be going?" asked the lawyer, also rising. "Well, I'm glad I haven't shocked you. Come in oftener when you are passing. And if you see anything I can help you in, always tell me."

The two men shook hands, with an emphatic and lingering clasp.

"I am glad," said Theron, "that you didn't stop coming to church just because you lost the girl."

Levi Gorringe answered the minister's pleasantry with a smile which curled his mustache upward, and expanded in little wrinkles at the ends of his eyes. "No," he said jestingly. "I'm death on collecting debts; and I reckon that the church still owes me a girl. I'll have one yet."

So, with merriment the echoes of which pleasantly accompanied Theron down the stairway, the two men parted.



CHAPTER XIII

Though time lagged in passing with a slowness which seemed born of studied insolence, there did arrive at last a day which had something definitive about it to Theron's disturbed and restless mind. It was a Thursday, and the prayer-meeting to be held that evening would be the last before the Quarterly Conference, now only four days off.

For some reason, the young minister found himself dwelling upon this fact, and investing it with importance. But yesterday the Quarterly Conference had seemed a long way ahead. Today brought it alarmingly close to hand. He had not heretofore regarded the weekly assemblage for prayer and song as a thing calling for preparation, or for any preliminary thought. Now on this Thursday morning he went to his desk after breakfast, which was a sign that he wanted the room to himself, quite as if he had the task of a weighty sermon before him. He sat at the desk all the forenoon, doing no writing, it is true, but remembering every once in a while, when his mind turned aside from the book in his hands, that there was that prayer-meeting in the evening.

Sometimes he reached the point of vaguely wondering why this strictly commonplace affair should be forcing itself thus upon his attention. Then, with a kind of mental shiver at the recollection that this was Thursday, and that the great struggle came on Monday, he would go back to his book.

There were a half-dozen volumes on the open desk before him. He had taken them out from beneath a pile of old "Sunday-School Advocates" and church magazines, where they had lain hidden from Alice's view most of the week. If there had been a locked drawer in the house, he would have used it instead to hold these books, which had come to him in a neat parcel, which also contained an amiable note from Dr. Ledsmar, recalling a pleasant evening in May, and expressing the hope that the accompanying works would be of some service. Theron had glanced at the backs of the uppermost two, and discovered that their author was Renan. Then he had hastily put the lot in the best place he could think of to escape his wife's observation.

He realized now that there had been no need for this secrecy. Of the other four books, by Sayce, Budge, Smith, and Lenormant, three indeed revealed themselves to be published under religious auspices. As for Renan, he might have known that the name would be meaningless to Alice. The feeling that he himself was not much wiser in this matter than his wife may have led him to pass over the learned text-books on Chaldean antiquity, and even the volume of Renan which appeared to be devoted to Oriental inscriptions, and take up his other book, entitled in the translation, "Recollections of my Youth." This he rather glanced through, at the outset, following with a certain inattention the introductory sketches and essays, which dealt with an unfamiliar, and, to his notion, somewhat preposterous Breton racial type. Then, little by little, it dawned upon him that there was a connected story in all this; and suddenly he came upon it, out in the open, as it were. It was the story of how a deeply devout young man, trained from his earliest boyhood for the sacred office, and desiring passionately nothing but to be worthy of it, came to a point where, at infinite cost of pain to himself and of anguish to those dearest to him, he had to declare that he could no longer believe at all in revealed religion.

Theron Ware read this all with an excited interest which no book had ever stirred in him before. Much of it he read over and over again, to make sure that he penetrated everywhere the husk of French habits of thought and Catholic methods in which the kernel was wrapped. He broke off midway in this part of the book to go out to the kitchen to dinner, and began the meal in silence. To Alice's questions he replied briefly that he was preparing himself for the evening's prayer-meeting. She lifted her brows in such frank surprise at this that he made a further and somewhat rambling explanation about having again taken up the work on his book—the book about Abraham.

"I thought you said you'd given that up altogether," she remarked.

"Well," he said, "I WAS discouraged about it for a while. But a man never does anything big without getting discouraged over and over again while he's doing it. I don't say now that I shall write precisely THAT book—I'm merely reading scientific works about the period, just now—but if not that, I shall write some other book. Else how will you get that piano?" he added, with an attempt at a smile.

"I thought you had given that up, too!" she replied ruefully. Then before he could speak, she went on: "Never mind the piano; that can wait. What I've got on my mind just now isn't piano; it's potatoes. Do you know, I saw some the other day at Rasbach's, splendid potatoes—these are some of them—and fifteen cents a bushel cheaper than those dried-up old things Brother Barnum keeps, and so I bought two bushels. And Sister Barnum met me on the street this morning, and threw it in my face that the Discipline commands us to trade with each other. Is there any such command?"

"Yes," said the husband. "It's Section 33. Don't you remember? I looked it up in Tyre. We are to 'evidence our desire of salvation by doing good, especially to them that are of the household of faith, or groaning so to be; by employing them preferably to others; buying one of another; helping each other in business'—and so on. Yes, it's all there."

"Well, I told her I didn't believe it was," put in Alice, "and I said that even if it was, there ought to be another section about selling potatoes to their minister for more than they're worth—potatoes that turn all green when you boil them, too. I believe I'll read up that old Discipline myself, and see if it hasn't got some things that I can talk back with."

"The very section before that, Number 32, enjoins members against 'uncharitable or unprofitable conversation—particularly speaking evil of magistrates or ministers.' You'd have 'em there, I think." Theron had begun cheerfully enough, but the careworn, preoccupied look returned now to his face. "I'm sorry if we've fallen out with the Barnums," he said. "His brother-in-law, Davis, the Sunday-school superintendent, is a member of the Quarterly Conference, you know, and I've been hoping that he was on my side. I've been taking a good deal of pains to make up to him."

He ended with a sigh, the pathos of which impressed Alice. "If you think it will do any good," she volunteered, "I'll go and call on the Davises this very afternoon. I'm sure to find her at home,—she's tied hand and foot with that brood of hers—and you'd better give me some of that candy for them."

Theron nodded his approval and thanks, and relapsed into silence. When the meal was over, he brought out the confectionery to his wife, and without a word went back to that remarkable book.

When Alice returned toward the close of day, to prepare the simple tea which was always laid a half-hour earlier on Thursdays and Sundays, she found her husband where she had left him, still busy with those new scientific works. She recounted to him some incidents of her call upon Mrs. Davis, as she took off her hat and put on the big kitchen apron—how pleased Mrs. Davis seemed to be; how her affection for her sister-in-law, the grocer's wife, disclosed itself to be not even skin-deep; how the children leaped upon the candy as if they had never seen any before; and how, in her belief, Mr. Davis would be heart and soul on Theron's side at the Conference.

To her surprise, the young minister seemed not at all interested. He hardly looked at her during her narrative, but reclined in the easy-chair with his head thrown back, and an abstracted gaze wandering aimlessly about the ceiling. When she avowed her faith in the Sunday-school superintendent's loyal partisanship, which she did with a pardonable pride in having helped to make it secure, her husband even closed his eyes, and moved his head with a gesture which plainly bespoke indifference.

"I expected you'd be tickled to death," she remarked, with evident disappointment.

"I've a bad headache," he explained, after a minute's pause.

"No wonder!" Alice rejoined, sympathetically enough, but with a note of reproof as well. "What can you expect, staying cooped up in here all day long, poring over those books? People are all the while remarking that you study too much. I tell them, of course, that you're a great hand for reading, and always were; but I think myself it would be better if you got out more, and took more exercise, and saw people. You know lots and slathers more than THEY do now, or ever will, if you never opened another book."

Theron regarded her with an expression which she had never seen on his face before. "You don't realize what you are saying," he replied slowly. He sighed as he added, with increased gravity, "I am the most ignorant man alive!"

Alice began a little laugh of wifely incredulity, and then let it die away as she recognized that he was really troubled and sad in his mind. She bent over to kiss him lightly on the brow, and tiptoed her way out into the kitchen.

"I believe I will let you make my excuses at the prayer-meeting this evening," he said all at once, as the supper came to an end. He had eaten next to nothing during the meal, and had sat in a sort of brown-study from which Alice kindly forbore to arouse him. "I don't know—I hardly feel equal to it. They won't take it amiss—for once—if you explain to them that I—I am not at all well."

"Oh, I do hope you're not coming down with anything!" Alice had risen too, and was gazing at him with a solicitude the tenderness of which at once comforted, and in some obscure way jarred on his nerves. "Is there anything I can do—or shall I go for a doctor? We've got mustard in the house, and senna—I think there's some senna left—and Jamaica ginger."

Theron shook his head wearily at her. "Oh, no,—no!" he expostulated. "It isn't anything that needs drugs, or doctors either. It's just mental worry and fatigue, that's all. An evening's quiet rest in the big chair, and early to bed—that will fix me up all right."

"But you'll read; and that will make your head worse," said Alice.

"No, I won't read any more," he promised her, walking slowly into the sitting-room, and settling himself in the big chair, the while she brought out a pillow from the adjoining best bedroom, and adjusted it behind his head. "That's nice! I'll just lie quiet here, and perhaps doze a little till you come back. I feel in the mood for the rest; it will do me all sorts of good."

He closed his eyes; and Alice, regarding his upturned face anxiously, decided that already it looked more at peace than awhile ago.

"Well, I hope you'll be better when I get back," she said, as she began preparations for the evening service. These consisted in combing stiffly back the strands of light-brown hair which, during the day, had exuberantly loosened themselves over her temples into something almost like curls; in fastening down upon this rebellious hair a plain brown-straw bonnet, guiltless of all ornament save a binding ribbon of dull umber hue; and in putting on a thin dark-gray shawl and a pair of equally subdued lisle-thread gloves. Thus attired, she made a mischievous little grimace of dislike at her puritanical image in the looking-glass over the mantel, and then turned to announce her departure.

"Well, I'm off," she said. Theron opened his eyes to take in this figure of his wife dressed for prayer-meeting, and then closed them again abruptly. "All right," he murmured, and then he heard the door shut behind her.

Although he had been alone all day, there seemed to be quite a unique value and quality in this present solitude. He stretched out his legs on the opposite chair, and looked lazily about him, with the feeling that at last he had secured some leisure, and could think undisturbed to his heart's content. There were nearly two hours of unbroken quiet before him; and the mere fact of his having stepped aside from the routine of his duty to procure it; marked it in his thoughts as a special occasion, which ought in the nature of things to yield more than the ordinary harvest of mental profit.

Theron's musings were broken in upon from time to time by rumbling outbursts of hymn-singing from the church next door. Surely, he said to himself, there could be no other congregation in the Conference, or in all Methodism, which sang so badly as these Octavians did. The noise, as it came to him now and again, divided itself familiarly into a main strain of hard, high, sharp, and tinny female voices, with three or four concurrent and clashing branch strains of part-singing by men who did not know how. How well he already knew these voices! Through two wooden walls he could detect the conceited and pushing note of Brother Lovejoy, who tried always to drown the rest out, and the lifeless, unmeasured weight of shrill clamor which Sister Barnum hurled into every chorus, half closing her eyes and sticking out her chin as she did so. They drawled their hymns too, these people, till Theron thought he understood that injunction in the Discipline against singing too slowly. It had puzzled him heretofore; now he felt that it must have been meant in prophecy for Octavius.

It was impossible not to recall in contrast that other church music he had heard, a month before, and the whole atmosphere of that other pastoral sitting room, from which he had listened to it. The startled and crowded impressions of that strange evening had been lying hidden in his mind all this while, driven into a corner by the pressure of more ordinary, everyday matters. They came forth now, and passed across his brain—no longer confusing and distorted, but in orderly and intelligible sequence. Their earlier effect had been one of frightened fascination. Now he looked them over calmly as they lifted themselves, one by one, and found himself not shrinking at all, or evading anything, but dwelling upon each in turn as a natural and welcome part of the most important experience of his life.

The young minister had arrived, all at once, at this conclusion. He did not question at all the means by which he had reached it. Nothing was clearer to his mind than the conclusion itself—that his meeting, with the priest and the doctor was the turning-point in his career. They had lifted him bodily out of the slough of ignorance, of contact with low minds and sordid, narrow things, and put him on solid ground. This book he had been reading—this gentle, tender, lovable book, which had as much true piety in it as any devotional book he had ever read, and yet, unlike all devotional books, put its foot firmly upon everything which could not be proved in human reason to be true—must be merely one of a thousand which men like Father Forbes and Dr. Ledsmar knew by heart. The very thought that he was on the way now to know them, too, made Theron tremble. The prospect wooed him, and he thrilled in response, with the wistful and delicate eagerness of a young lover.

Somehow, the fact that the priest and the doctor were not religious men, and that this book which had so impressed and stirred him was nothing more than Renan's recital of how he, too, ceased to be a religious man, did not take a form which Theron could look square in the face. It wore the shape, instead, of a vague premise that there were a great many different kinds of religions—the past and dead races had multiplied these in their time literally into thousands—and that each no doubt had its central support of truth somewhere for the good men who were in it, and that to call one of these divine and condemn all the others was a part fit only for untutored bigots. Renan had formally repudiated Catholicism, yet could write in his old age with the deepest filial affection of the Mother Church he had quitted. Father Forbes could talk coolly about the "Christ-myth" without even ceasing to be a priest, and apparently a very active and devoted priest. Evidently there was an intellectual world, a world of culture and grace, of lofty thoughts and the inspiring communion of real knowledge, where creeds were not of importance, and where men asked one another, not "Is your soul saved?" but "Is your mind well furnished?" Theron had the sensation of having been invited to become a citizen of this world. The thought so dazzled him that his impulses were dragging him forward to take the new oath of allegiance before he had had time to reflect upon what it was he was abandoning.

The droning of the Doxology from the church outside stirred Theron suddenly out of his revery. It had grown quite dark, and he rose and lit the gas. "Blest be the Tie that Binds," they were singing. He paused, with hand still in air, to listen. That well-worn phrase arrested his attention, and gave itself a new meaning. He was bound to those people, it was true, but he could never again harbor the delusion that the tie between them was blessed. There was vaguely present in his mind the consciousness that other ties were loosening as well. Be that as it might, one thing was certain. He had passed definitely beyond pretending to himself that there was anything spiritually in common between him and the Methodist Church of Octavius. The necessity of his keeping up the pretence with others rose on the instant like a looming shadow before his mental vision. He turned away from it, and bent his brain to think of something else.

The noise of Alice opening the front door came as a pleasant digression. A second later it became clear from the sound of voices that she had brought some one back with her, and Theron hastily stretched himself out again in the armchair, with his head back in the pillow, and his feet on the other chair. He had come mighty near forgetting that he was an invalid, and he protected himself the further now by assuming an air of lassitude verging upon prostration.

"Yes; there's a light burning. It's all right," he heard Alice say. She entered the room, and Theron's head was too bad to permit him to turn it, and see who her companion was.

"Theron dear," Alice began, "I knew you'd be glad to see HER, even if you were out of sorts; and I persuaded her just to run in for a minute. Let me introduce you to Sister Soulsby. Sister Soulsby—my husband."

The Rev. Mr. Ware sat upright with an energetic start, and fastened upon the stranger a look which conveyed anything but the satisfaction his wife had been so sure about. It was at the first blush an undisguised scowl, and only some fleeting memory of that reflection about needing now to dissemble, prevented him from still frowning as he rose to his feet, and perfunctorily held out his hand.

"Delighted, I'm sure," he mumbled. Then, looking up, he discovered that Sister Soulsby knew he was not delighted, and that she seemed not to mind in the least.

"As your good lady said, I just ran in for a moment," she remarked, shaking his limp hand with a brisk, business-like grasp, and dropping it. "I hate bothering sick people, but as we're to be thrown together a good deal this next week or so, I thought I'd like to lose no time in saying 'howdy.' I won't keep you up now. Your wife has been sweet enough to ask me to move my trunk over here in the morning, so that you'll see enough of me and to spare."

Theron looked falteringly into her face, as he strove for words which should sufficiently mask the disgust this intelligence stirred within him. A debt-raiser in the town was bad enough! A debt-raiser quartered in the very parsonage!—he ground his teeth to think of it.

Alice read his hesitation aright. "Sister Soulsby went to the hotel," she hastily put in; "and Loren Pierce was after her to come and stay at his house, and I ventured to tell her that I thought we could make her more comfortable here." She accompanied this by so daring a grimace and nod that her husband woke up to the fact that a point in Conference politics was involved.

He squeezed a doubtful smile upon his features. "We shall both do our best," he said. It was not easy, but he forced increasing amiability into his glance and tone. "Is Brother Soulsby here, too?" he asked.

The debt-raiser shook her head—again the prompt, decisive movement, so like a busy man of affairs. "No," she answered. "He's doing supply down on the Hudson this week, but he'll be here in time for the Sunday morning love-feast. I always like to come on ahead, and see how the land lies. Well, good-night! Your head will be all right in the morning."

Precisely what she meant by this assurance, Theron did not attempt to guess. He received her adieu, noted the masterful manner in which she kissed his wife, and watched her pass out into the hall, with the feeling uppermost that this was a person who decidedly knew her way about. Much as he was prepared to dislike her, and much as he detested the vulgar methods her profession typified, he could not deny that she seemed a very capable sort of woman.

This mental concession did not prevent his fixing upon Alice, when she returned to the room, a glance of obvious disapproval.

"Theron," she broke forth, to anticipate his reproach, "I did it for the best. The Pierces would have got her if I hadn't cut in. I thought it would help to have her on our side. And, besides, I like her. She's the first sister I've seen since we've been in this hole that's had a kind word for me—or—or sympathized with me! And—and—if you're going to be offended—I shall cry!"

There were real tears on her lashes, ready to make good the threat. "Oh, I guess I wouldn't," said Theron, with an approach to his old, half-playful manner. "If you like her, that's the chief thing."

Alice shook her tear-drops away. "No," she replied, with a wistful smile; "the chief thing is to have her like you. She's as smart as a steel trap—that woman is—and if she took the notion, I believe she could help get us a better place."



CHAPTER XIV

The ensuing week went by with a buzz and whirl, circling about Theron Ware's dizzy consciousness like some huge, impalpable teetotum sent spinning under Sister Soulsby's resolute hands. Whenever his vagrant memory recurred to it, in after months, he began by marvelling, and ended with a shudder of repulsion.

It was a week crowded with events, which seemed to him to shoot past so swiftly that in effect they came all of a heap. He never essayed the task, in retrospect, of arranging them in their order of sequence. They had, however, a definite and interdependent chronology which it is worth the while to trace.

Mrs. Soulsby brought her trunk round to the parsonage bright and early on Friday morning, and took up her lodgement in the best bedroom, and her headquarters in the house at large, with a cheerful and business-like manner. She desired nothing so much, she said, as that people should not put themselves out on her account, or allow her to get in their way. She appeared to mean this, too, and to have very good ideas about securing its realization.

During both Friday and the following day, indeed, Theron saw her only at the family meals. There she displayed a hearty relish for all that was set before her which quite won Mrs. Ware's heart, and though she talked rather more than Theron found himself expecting from a woman, he could not deny that her conversation was both seemly and entertaining. She had evidently been a great traveller, and referred to things she had seen in Savannah or Montreal or Los Angeles in as matter-of-fact fashion as he could have spoken of a visit to Tecumseh. Theron asked her many questions about these and other far-off cities, and her answers were all so pat and showed so keen and clear an eye that he began in spite of himself to think of her with a certain admiration.

She in turn plied him with inquiries about the principal pew-holders and members of his congregation—their means, their disposition, and the measure of their devotion. She put these queries with such intelligence, and seemed to assimilate his replies with such an alert understanding, that the young minister was spurred to put dashes of character in his descriptions, and set forth the idiosyncrasies and distinguishing earmarks of his flock with what he felt afterward might have been too free a tongue. But at the time her fine air of appreciation led him captive. He gossiped about his parishioners as if he enjoyed it. He made a specially happy thumb-nail sketch for her of one of his trustees, Erastus Winch, the loud-mouthed, ostentatiously jovial, and really cold-hearted cheese-buyer. She was particularly interested in hearing about this man. The personality of Winch seemed to have impressed her, and she brought the talk back to him more than once, and prompted Theron to the very threshold of indiscretion in his confidences on the subject.

Save at meal-times, Sister Soulsby spent the two days out around among the Methodists of Octavius. She had little or nothing to say about what she thus saw and heard, but used it as the basis for still further inquiries. She told more than once, however, of how she had been pressed here or there to stay to dinner or supper, and how she had excused herself. "I've knocked about too much," she would explain to the Wares, "not to fight shy of random country cooking. When I find such a born cook as you are—well I know when I'm well off." Alice flushed with pleased pride at this, and Theron himself felt that their visitor showed great good sense. By Saturday noon, the two women were calling each other by their first names. Theron learned with a certain interest that Sister Soulsby's Christian name was Candace.

It was only natural that he should give even more thought to her than to her quaint and unfamiliar old Ethiopian name. She was undoubtedly a very smart woman. To his surprise she had never introduced in her talk any of the stock religious and devotional phrases which official Methodists so universally employed in mutual converse. She might have been an insurance agent, or a school-teacher, visiting in a purely secular household, so little parade of cant was there about her.

He caught himself wondering how old she was. She seemed to have been pretty well over the whole American continent, and that must take years of time. Perhaps, however, the exertion of so much travel would tend to age one in appearance. Her eyes were still youthful—decidedly wise eyes, but still juvenile. They had sparkled with almost girlish merriment at some of his jokes. She turned them about a good deal when she spoke, making their glances fit and illustrate the things she said. He had never met any one whose eyes played so constant and prominent a part in their owner's conversation. Theron had never seen a play; but he had encountered the portraits of famous queens of the drama several times in illustrated papers or shop windows, and it occurred to him that some of the more marked contortions of Sister Soulsby's eyes—notably a trick she had of rolling them swiftly round and plunging them, so to speak, into an intent, yearning, one might almost say devouring, gaze at the speaker—were probably employed by eminent actresses like Ristori and Fanny Davenport.

The rest of Sister Soulsby was undoubtedly subordinated in interest to those eyes of hers. Sometimes her face seemed to be reviving temporarily a comeliness which had been constant in former days; then again it would look decidedly, organically, plain. It was the worn and loose-skinned face of a nervous, middle-aged woman, who had had more than her share of trouble, and drank too much tea. She wore the collar of her dress rather low; and Theron found himself wondering at this, because, though long and expansive, her neck certainly showed more cords and cavities than consorted with his vague ideal of statuesque beauty. Then he wondered at himself for thinking about it, and abruptly reined up his fancy, only to find that it was playing with speculations as to whether her yellowish complexion was due to that tea-drinking or came to her as a legacy of Southern blood.

He knew that she was born in the South because she said so. From the same source he learned that her father had been a wealthy planter, who was ruined by the war, and sank into a premature grave under the weight of his accumulated losses. The large dark rings around her eyes grew deeper still in their shadows when she told about this, and her ordinarily sharp voice took on a mellow cadence, with a soft, drawling accent, turning U's into O's, and having no R's to speak of. Theron had imbibed somewhere in early days the conviction that the South was the land of romance, of cavaliers and gallants and black eyes flashing behind mantillas and outspread fans, and somehow when Sister Soulsby used this intonation she suggested all these things.

But almost all her talk was in another key—a brisk, direct, idiomatic manner of speech, with an intonation hinting at no section in particular. It was merely that of the city-dweller as distinguished from the rustic. She was of about Alice's height, perhaps a shade taller. It did not escape the attention of the Wares that she wore clothes of a more stylish cut and a livelier arrangement of hues than any Alice had ever dared own, even in lax-minded Tyre. The two talked of this in their room on Friday night; and Theron explained that congregations would tolerate things of this sort with a stranger which would be sharply resented in the case of local folk whom they controlled. It was on this occasion that Alice in turn told Theron she was sure Mrs. Soulsby had false teeth—a confidence which she immediately regretted as an act of treachery to her sex.

On Saturday afternoon, toward evening, Brother Soulsby arrived, and was guided to the parsonage by his wife, who had gone to the depot to meet him. They must have talked over the situation pretty thoroughly on the way, for by the time the new-comer had washed his face and hands and put on a clean collar, Sister Soulsby was ready to announce her plan of campaign in detail.

Her husband was a man of small stature and, like herself, of uncertain age. He had a gentle, if rather dry, clean-shaven face, and wore his dust-colored hair long behind. His little figure was clad in black clothes of a distinctively clerical fashion, and he had a white neck-cloth neatly tied under his collar. The Wares noted that he looked clean and amiable rather than intellectually or spiritually powerful, as he took the vacant seat between theirs, and joined them in concentrating attention upon Mrs. Soulsby.

This lady, holding herself erect and alert on the edge of the low, big easy-chair had the air of presiding over a meeting.

"My idea is," she began, with an easy implication that no one else's idea was needed, "that your Quarterly Conference, when it meets on Monday, must be adjourned to Tuesday. We will have the people all out tomorrow morning to love-feast, and announcement can be made there, and at the morning service afterward, that a series of revival meetings are to be begun that same evening. Mr. Soulsby and I can take charge in the evening, and we'll see to it that THAT packs the house—fills the church to overflowing Monday evening. Then we'll quietly turn the meeting into a debt-raising convention, before they know where they are, and we'll wipe off the best part of the load. Now, don't you see," she turned her eyes full upon Theron as she spoke, "you want to hold your Quarterly Conference AFTER this money's been raised, not before."

"I see what you mean," Mr. Ware responded gravely. "But—"

"But what!" Sister Soulsby interjected, with vivacity.

"Well," said Theron, picking his words, "in the first place, it rests with the Presiding Elder to say whether an adjournment can be made until Tuesday, not with me."

"That's all right. Leave that to me," said the lady.

"In the second place," Theron went on, still more hesitatingly, "there seems a certain—what shall I say?—indirection in—in—"

"In getting them together for a revival, and springing a debt-raising on them?" Sister Soulsby put in. "Why, man alive, that's the best part of it. You ought to be getting some notion by this time what these Octavius folks of yours are like. I've only been here two days, but I've got their measure down to an allspice. Supposing you were to announce tomorrow that the debt was to be raised Monday. How many men with bank-accounts would turn up, do you think? You could put them all in your eye, sir—all in your eye!"

"Very possibly you're right," faltered the young minister.

"Right? Why, of course I'm right," she said, with placid confidence. "You've got to take folks as you find them; and you've got to find them the best way you can. One place can be worked, managed, in one way, and another needs quite a different way, and both ways would be dead frosts—complete failures—in a third."

Brother Soulsby coughed softly here, and shuffled his feet for an instant on the carpet. His wife resumed her remarks with slightly abated animation, and at a slower pace.

"My experience," she said, "has shown me that the Apostle was right. To properly serve the cause, one must be all things to all men. I have known very queer things indeed turn out to be means of grace. You simply CAN'T get along without some of the wisdom of the serpent. We are commanded to have it, for that matter. And now, speaking of that, do you know when the Presiding Elder arrives in town today, and where he is going to eat supper and sleep?"

Theron shook his head. "All I know is he isn't likely to come here," he said, and added sadly, "I'm afraid he's not an admirer of mine."

"Perhaps that's not all his fault," commented Sister Soulsby. "I'll tell you something. He came in on the same train as my husband, and that old trustee Pierce of yours was waiting for him with his buggy, and I saw like a flash what was in the wind, and the minute the train stopped I caught the Presiding Elder, and invited him in your name to come right here and stay; told him you and Alice were just set on his coming—wouldn't take no for an answer. Of course he couldn't come—I knew well enough he had promised old Pierce—but we got in our invitation anyway, and it won't do you any harm. Now, that's what I call having some gumption—wisdom of the serpent, and so on."

"I'm sure," remarked Alice, "I should have been mortified to death if he had come. We lost the extension-leaf to our table in moving, and four is all it'll seat decently."

Sister Soulsby smiled winningly into the wife's honest face. "Don't you see, dear," she explained patiently, "I only asked him because I knew he couldn't come. A little butter spreads a long way, if it's only intelligently warmed."

"It was certainly very ingenious of you," Theron began almost stiffly. Then he yielded to the humanities, and with a kindling smile added, "And it was as kind as kind could be. I'm afraid you're wrong about it's doing me any good, but I can see how well you meant it, and I'm grateful."

"We COULD have sneaked in the kitchen table, perhaps, while he was out in the garden, and put on the extra long tablecloth," interjected Alice, musingly.

Sister Soulsby smiled again at Sister Ware, but without any words this time; and Alice on the instant rose, with the remark that she must be going out to see about supper.

"I'm going to insist on coming out to help you," Mrs. Soulsby declared, "as soon as I've talked over one little matter with your husband. Oh, yes, you must let me this time. I insist!"

As the kitchen door closed behind Mrs. Ware, a swift and apparently significant glance shot its way across from Sister Soulsby's roving, eloquent eyes to the calmer and smaller gray orbs of her husband. He rose to his feet, made some little explanation about being a gardener himself, and desiring to inspect more closely some rhododendrons he had noticed in the garden, and forthwith moved decorously out by the other door into the front hall. They heard his footsteps on the gravel beneath the window before Mrs. Soulsby spoke again.

"You're right about the Presiding Elder, and you're wrong," she said. "He isn't what one might call precisely in love with you. Oh, I know the story—how you got into debt at Tyre, and he stepped in and insisted on your being denied Tecumseh and sent here instead."

"HE was responsible for that, then, was he?" broke in Theron, with contracted brows.

"Why, don't you make any effort to find out anything at ALL?" she asked pertly enough, but with such obvious good-nature that he could not but have pleasure in her speech. "Why, of course he did it! Who else did you suppose?"

"Well," said the young minister, despondently, "if he's as much against me as all that, I might as well hang up my fiddle and go home."

Sister Soulsby gave a little involuntary groan of impatience. She bent forward, and, lifting her eyes, rolled them at him in a curve of downward motion which suggested to his fancy the image of two eagles in a concerted pounce upon a lamb.

"My friend," she began, with a new note of impressiveness in her voice, "if you'll pardon my saying it, you haven't got the spunk of a mouse. If you're going to lay down, and let everybody trample over you just as they please, you're right! You MIGHT as well go home. But now here, this is what I wanted to say to you: Do you just keep your hands off these next few days, and leave this whole thing to me. I'll pull it into shipshape for you. No—wait a minute—don't interrupt now. I have taken a liking to you. You've got brains, and you've got human nature in you, and heart. What you lack is SABE—common-sense. You'll get that, too, in time, and meanwhile I'm not going to stand by and see you cut up and fed to the dogs for want of it. I'll get you through this scrape, and put you on your feet again, right-side-up-with care, because, as I said, I like you. I like your wife, too, mind. She's a good, honest little soul, and she worships the very ground you tread on. Of course, as long as people WILL marry in their teens, the wrong people will get yoked up together. But that's neither here nor there. She's a kind sweet little body, and she's devoted to you, and it isn't every intellectual man that gets even that much. But now it's a go, is it? You promise to keep quiet, do you, and leave the whole show absolutely to me? Shake hands on it."

Sister Soulsby had risen, and stood now holding out her hand in a frank, manly fashion. Theron looked at the hand, and made mental notes that there were a good many veins discernible on the small wrist, and that the forearm seemed to swell out more than would have been expected in a woman producing such a general effect of leanness. He caught the shine of a thin bracelet-band of gold under the sleeve. A delicate, significant odor just hinted its presence in the air about this outstretched arm—something which was not a perfume, yet deserved as gracious a name.

He rose to his feet, and took the proffered hand with a deliberate gesture, as if he had been cautiously weighing all the possible arguments for and against this momentous compact.

"I promise," he said gravely, and the two palms squeezed themselves together in an earnest clasp.

"Right you are," exclaimed the lady, once more with cheery vivacity. "Mind, when it's all over, I'm going to give you a good, serious, downright talking to—a regular hoeing-over. I'm not sure I shan't give you a sound shaking into the bargain. You need it. And now I'm going out to help Alice."

The Reverend Mr. Ware remained standing after his new friend had left the room, and his meditative face wore an even unusual air of abstraction. He strolled aimlessly over, after a time, to the desk by the window, and stood there looking out at the slight figure of Brother Soulsby, who was bending over and attentively regarding some pink blossoms on a shrub through what seemed to be a pocket magnifying-glass.