She remembered the name from that old tale of Caleb Webster's.

"Is—is this friend of yours—Mr. Hoover—in good health?"

"Fine—weighs a hundred and eighty. He and I have a ranch on the Wimmenuche—only Hoover's been doing most of the work while I thought about things. I see that. Hoover says one can't do much for the world but laugh at it. He has a theory of his own. He maintains that God set this planet whirling, then turned away for a moment to start another universe or something. He says that when the Creator glances back at us again, to find this poor, scrubby little earth-family divided over its clod, the strong robbing the weak in the midst of plenty for all—enslaving them to starve and toil and fight, spending more for war than would keep the entire family in luxury; that when God looks closer, in his amazement, and finds that, next to greed, the matter of worshipping Him has made most of the war and other deviltry—the hatred and persecution and killing among all the little brothers—he will laugh aloud before he reflects, and this little ballful of funny, passionate insects will be blown to bits. He says if the world comes to an end in his lifetime, he will know God has happened to look this way, and perhaps overheard a bishop say something vastly important about Apostolic succession or the validity of the Anglican Orders or Transubstantiation or 'communion in two kinds' or something. He insists that a sense of humour is our only salvation—that only those will be saved who happen to be laughing for the same reason that God laughs when He looks at us—that the little Mohammedans and Christians and things will be burned for their blasphemy of believing God not wise and good enough to save them all, Mohammedan and Christian alike, though not thinking excessively well of either; that only those laughing at the whole gory nonsense will go into everlasting life by reason of their superior faith in God."

"Of course that's plausible, and yet it's radical. Hoover's father was a bishop, and I think Hoover is just a bit narrow from early training. He can't see that lots of people who haven't a vestige of humour are nevertheless worth saving. I admit that saving them will be a thankless task. God won't be able to take very much pleasure in it, but in strict justice he will do it—even if Hoover does regard it as a piece of extravagant sentimentality."

A little later she went in. She left him gazing far off into the night, filled with his message, dull to memory on the very scene that evoked in her own heart so much from the old days. And as she went she laughed inwardly at a certain consternation the woman of her could not wholly put down; for she had blindly hurled herself against a wall—the wall of his message. But it was funny, and the message chained her interest. She could, she thought, strengthen his resolution to give it out—help him in a thousand ways.

As she fell asleep the thought of him hovered and drifted on her heart softly, as darkness rests on tired eyes.



CHAPTER XI

THE REMORSE OF WONDERING NANCY

She awoke to the sun, glad-hearted and made newly buoyant by one of those soundless black sleeping-nights that come only to the town-tired when they have first fled. She ran to the glass to know if the restoration she felt might also be seen. With unbiassed calculation the black-fringed lids drew apart and one hand pushed back of the temple, and held there, a tangled skein of hair that had thrown the dusk of a deep wood about her eyes. Then, as she looked, came the little dreaming smile that unfitted critic eyes for their office; a smile that wakened to a laugh as she looked—a little womanish chuckle of confident joy, as one alone speaking aloud in an overflowing moment.

An hour later she was greeting Bernal where the sun washed through the big room.

"Young life sings in me!" she said, and felt his lightening eyes upon her lips as she smiled.

There were three days of it—days in which, however, she grew to fear those eyes, lest they fall upon her in judgment. She now saw that his eyes had changed most. They gave the face its look of absence, of dreaming awkwardness. They had the depth of a hazy sky at times, then cleared to a coldly lucid glance that would see nothing ever to fear, within or without; that would hide no falseness nor yet be deceived by any—a deadly half-shut, appraising coolness that would know false from true, even though they mated amicably and distractingly in one mind.

The effect of this glance which she found upon herself from time to time was to make Nancy suspect herself—to question her motives and try her defenses. To her amazement she found these latter weak under Bernal's gaze, and there grew in her a tender remorse for the injustice she had done her husband. From little pricking suspicions on the first day she came on the last to conviction. It seemed that being with Bernal had opened her eyes to Allan's worth. She had narrowly, flippantly misjudged a good man—good in all essentials. She was contrite for her unwifely lack of abnegation. She began to see herself and Allan with Bernal's eyes: she was less than she had thought—he was more. Bernal had proved these things to her all unconsciously. Now her heart was flooded with gratitude for his simple, ready, heartfelt praise of his brother—of his unfailing good-temper, his loyalty, his gifts, his modesty so often distressed by outspoken admiration of his personal graces. She listened and applauded with a heart that renewed itself in all good resolves of devotion. Even when Bernal talked of himself, he made her feel that she had been unjust to Allan.

Little by little she drew many things from him—the story of his journeyings and of his still more intricate mental wanderings. And it thrilled her to think he had come back with a message—even though he already doubted himself. Sometimes he would be jocular about it and again hot with a passion to express himself.

"Nance," he said on another night, "when you have a real faith in God a dead man is a miracle not less than a living—and a live man dying is quite as wondrous as a dead man living. Do you know, I was staggered one day by discovering that the earth didn't give way when I stepped on it? The primitive man knowing little of physics doesn't know that a child's hand could move the earth through space—but for a certain mysterious resistance. That's God. I felt him all that day, at every step, pushing the little globe back under me—counteracting me—resisting me—ever so gently. Those are times when you feel you must tell it, Nance—when the God-consciousness comes."

"Oh, Bernal, if you could—if you could come back to do what your grandfather really wanted you to do—to preach something worth while!"

"I doubt the need for my message, Nance. I need for myself a God that could no more spare a Hottentot than a Pope—but I doubt if the world does. No one would listen to me—I'm only a dreamer. Once, when I was small they gave me a candy cane for Christmas. It was a thing I had long worshipped in shop-windows—actually worshipped as the primitive man worshipped his idol. I can remember how sad I was when no one else worshipped with me, or paid the least attention to my treasure. I suspect I shall meet the same indifference now. And I hope I'll have the same philosophy. I remember I brought myself to eat the cane, which I suppose is the primary intention regarding them—and perhaps the fruits of one's faith should be eaten quite as practically."

They had sent no word to Allan, agreeing it were better fun to surprise him. When they took the train together on the third day, the wife not less than the brother looked forward to a joyous reunion with him. And now that Nancy had proved in her heart the perverse unwifeliness of her old attitude and was eager to begin the symbolic rites of her atonement, it came to her to wonder how Bernal would have judged her had she persisted in that first wild impulse of rebellion. She wanted to see from what degree of his reprobation she had saved herself. She would be circuitous in her approach.

"You remember, Bernal, that night you went away—how you said there was no moral law under the sky for you but your own?"

He smiled, and above the noise of the train his voice came to her as his voice of old came above the noise of the years.

"Yes—Nance—that was right. No moral law but mine. I carried out my threat to make them all find their authority in me."

"Then you still believe yours is the only authority?"

"Yes; it sounds licentious and horrible, doesn't it; but there are two queer things about it—the first is that man quite naturally wishes to be decent, and the second is that, when he does come to rely wholly upon the authority within himself, he finds it a stricter disciplinarian than ever the decalogue was. One needs only ordinary good taste to keep the ten commandments—the moral ones. A man may observe them all and still be morally rotten! But it's no joke to live by one's own law, and yet that's all anybody has to keep him right, if we only knew it, Nance—barring a few human statutes against things like murder and keeping one's barber-shop open on the Sabbath—the ruder offenses which no gentleman ever wishes to commit.

"And must poor woman be ruled by her own God, too?"

"Why not?"

"Well, it's not so long ago that the fathers of the Church were debating in council whether she had a soul or not, charging her with bringing sin, sickness and death into the world."

"Exactly. St. John Damascene called her 'a daughter of falsehood and a sentinel of hell'; St. Jerome came in with 'Woman is the gate of the devil, the road to iniquity, the sting of the scorpion'; St. Gregory, I believe, considered her to have no comprehension of goodness; pious old Tertullian complimented her with corrupting those whom Satan dare not attack; and then there was St. Chrysostom—really he was much more charitable than his fellow Saints—it always seemed to me he was not only more humane but more human—more interested, you might say. You know he said, 'Woman is a necessary evil, a domestic peril, a deadly fascination, a painted ill.' It always seemed to me St. Chrysostom had a past. But really, I think they all went too far. I don't know woman very well, but I suspect she has to find her moral authority where man finds his—within herself."

"You know what made me ask—a little woman in town came to see Allan not long ago to know if she mightn't leave her husband—she had what seemed to her sufficient reason."

"I imagine Allan said 'no.'"

"He did. Would you have advised her differently?"

"Bless you, no. I'd advise her to obey her priest. The fact that she consulted him shows that she has no law of her own. St. Paul said this wise and deep thing: 'I know and am persuaded by the Lord Jesus that there is nothing unclean of itself; but to him that esteemeth anything unclean, to him it is unclean!'"

"Then it lay in her own view of it. If she had felt free to go, she would have done right to go."

"Naturally."

"Yet Allan talked to her about the sanctity of the home."

"I doubt if the sanctity of the home is maintained by keeping unwilling mates together, Nance. I can imagine nothing less sanctified than a home of that sort—peopled by a couple held together against the desire of either or both. The willing mates need no compulsion, and they're the ones, it seems to me, that have given the home its reputation for sanctity. I never thought much about divorce, but I can see that much at once. Of course, Allan takes the Church's attitude, which survives from a time when a woman was bought and owned; when the God of Moses classed her with the ox and the ass as a thing one must not covet."

"You really think if a woman has made a failure of her marriage she has a right to break it."

"That seems sound as a general law, Nance—better for her to make a hundred failures, for that matter, than stay meekly in the first because of any superstition. But, mind you, if she suspects that the Church may, after all, have succeeded in tying up the infinite with red-tape and sealing-wax—believes that God is a large, dark notary-public who has recorded her marriage in a book—she will do better to stay. Doubtless the conceit of it will console her—that the God who looks after the planets has an eye on her, to see that she makes but one guess about so uncertain a thing as a man."

"Then you would advise—"

"No, I wouldn't. The woman who has to be advised should never take advice. I dare say divorce is quite as hazardous as marriage, though possibly most people divorce with a somewhat riper discretion than they marry with. But the point is that neither marriage nor divorce can be considered a royal road to happiness, and a woman ought to get her impetus in either case from her own inner consciousness. I should call divorcing by advice quite as silly as marrying by it."

"But it comes at last to her own law in her own heart?"

"When she has awakened to it—when she honestly feels it. God's law for woman is the same as for man—and he has but two laws for both that are universal and unchanging: The first is, they are bound at all times to desire happiness; the second is, that they can be happy only by being wise—which is what we sometimes mean when we say 'good,' but of course no one knows what wisdom is for all, nor what goodness is for all, because we are not mechanical dolls of the same pattern. That's why I reverence God—the scheme is so ingenious—so productive of variety in goodness and wisdom. Probably an evil marriage is as hard to be quit of as any vice. People persist long after the sanctity has gone—because they lack moral courage. Hoover was quite that way with cigarettes. If some one could only have made Jim believe that God had joined him to cigarettes, and that he mustn't quit them or he'd shatter the foundations of our domestic integrity—he'd have died in cheerful smoke—very soon after a time when he says I saved his life. All he wanted was some excuse to go on smoking. Most people are so—slothful-souled. But remember, don't advise your friend in town. Her asking advice is a sign that she shouldn't have it. She is not of the coterie that Paul describes—if you don't mind Paul once more—'Happy is he that condemneth not himself in that which he alloweth.'"

There had come to the woman a vast influx of dignity—a joyous increase in the volume of that new feeling that called to her husband. She would have gone back, but one of the reasons would have been because she thought it "right"—because it was what the better world did! But now—ah! now—she was going unhampered by that compulsion which galls even the best. She was free to stay away, but of her own glad, loyal will she was going back to the husband she had treated unjustly, judged by too narrow a standard.

"Allan will be so astonished and delighted," she said, when the coupe rolled out of the train-shed.

She remembered now with a sort of pride the fine, unflinching sternness with which he had condemned divorce. In a man of principles so staunch one might overlook many surface eccentricities.



CHAPTER XII

THE FLEXIBLE MIND OF A PLEASED HUSBAND

As they entered the little reception-room from the hall, the doors of the next room were pushed apart and they saw Allan bowing out Mrs. Talwin Covil, a meek, suppressed, neutral-tinted woman, the inevitable feminine corollary of such a man as Cyrus Browett, whose only sister she was.

The eyes of Nancy, glad with a knowing gladness, were quick for Allan's face, resting fondly there during the seconds in which he was changing from the dead astonishment to live recognition at sight of Bernal. During the shouts, the graspings, pokings, nudgings, the pumping of each other's arms that followed, Nancy turned to greet Mrs. Covil, who had paused before her.

"Do sit down a moment and tell me things," she urged, "while those boys go back there to have it out!"

Thus encouraged, Mrs. Covil dropped into a chair, seeming not loath to tell those things she had, while Nancy leaned back and listened duteously for a perfunctory ten minutes. Her thoughts ran ahead to Allan—and to Bernal—as children will run little journeys ahead of a slow-moving elder.

Then suddenly something that the troubled little woman was saying fixed her attention, pulling up her wandering thoughts with a jerk.

"—and the Doctor asked me, my dear, to treat it quite confidentially, except to bother Cyrus. But, I'm sure he would wish you to know. Of course it is a delicate matter—I can readily understand, as he says, how the public would misconstrue the Doctor's words and apply them generally—forgetting that each case requires a different point of view. But with Harold it is really a perfectly flagrant and dreadful case of mismating—due entirely to the poor boy's thoughtless chivalry—barely twenty-eight, mind you—as if a man nowadays knows his mind at all well before thirty-five. Of course, divorce is an evil that, broadly speaking, threatens the sanctity of our home life—no one understands that better than your husband—and re-marriage after divorce is usually an outrageous scandal—one, indeed, altogether too common—sometimes I wonder what we're coming to, it seems to be done so thoughtlessly—but individual instances are different—'exceptions prove the rule,' you know, as the old saying goes. Now Harold is ready to settle down, and the girl is of excellent family and all that—quite the social and moral brace he needs, in fact."

Nancy was attentive, yet a little puzzled.

"But—you speak of your son, Harold—is he not already married?"

"That's it, my dear. You know what a funny, bright, mischievous boy Harold is—even a little deliciously wild at times—doubtless you read of his marriage when it occurred—how these newspapers do relish anything of the sort—she was a theatrical young woman—what they call a 'show girl,' I believe. Humph!—with reason, I must say! Of all the egregious and inveterate showiness! My dear, she is positively a creature! Oh, if they'd only invent a monocle that would let a young man pierce the glamour of the footlights. I pledge you my word, she's—but never mind that! Harold was a thoughtless, restless boy—not bad, you know, but heedless. Why, he was quite the same about business. He began to speculate, and of course, being brother Cyrus's nephew, his advantage was considerable. But he suddenly declared he wouldn't be a broker any more—and you'd never guess his absurd reason: simply because some stock he held or didn't hold went up or down or something on a rumour in the street that Mr. Russell Sage was extremely ill! He said that this brought him to his senses. He says to me, 'Mater, I've not met Mr. Sage, you know, but from what I hear of him it would be irrational to place myself in a position where I should have to experience emotion of any sort at news of the old gentleman's taking-off. An event so agreeable to the natural order of God's providence, so plausible, so seemly, should not be endowed with any arbitrary and artificial significance, especially of a monetary character—one must be able to view it absolutely without emotion of any sort, either of regret or rejoicing—one must remain conscientiously indifferent as to when this excellent old gentleman passes on to the Golden Shore'—but you know the breezy way in which Harold will sometimes talk. Only now he seems really sobered by this new attachment—"

"But if he is already married—"

"Yes, yes—if you can call it married—a ceremony performed by one of those common magistrates—quite without the sanction of the Church—but all that is past, and he is now ready to marry one who can be a wife to him—only my conscience did hurt me a little, and brother Cyrus said to me, 'You see Linford and tell him I sent you. Linford is a man of remarkable breadth, of rare flexibility.'"

"Yes, and of course Allan was emphatically discouraging." Again she was recalling the fervour with which he had declared himself on this point on that last day when he actually made her believe in him.

"Oh, the Doctor is broad! He is what I should call adaptable. He said by all means to extricate Harold from this wretched predicament, not only on account of the property interests involved, but on account of his moral and spiritual welfare; that, while in spirit he holds deathlessly to the indissolubility of the marriage tie, still it is unreasonable to suppose that God ever joined Harold to a person so much his inferior, and that we may look forward to the real marriage—that on which the sanctity of the home is truly based—when the law has freed him from this boyish entanglement. Oh, my dear, I feel so relieved to know that my boy can have a wife from his own class—and still have it right up there—with Him, you know!" she concluded with an upward glance, as Nancy watched her with eyes grown strangely quiet, almost steely—watched her as one might watch an ant. She had the look of one whose will had been made suddenly to stand aside by some great inner tumult.

When her caller had gone she dropped back into the chair, absently pulling a glove through the fingers of one hand—her bag and parasol on the floor at her feet. One might have thought her on the point of leaving instead of having just come. The shadows were deepening in the corners of the room and about her half-shut eyes.

A long time she listened to the animated voices of the brothers. At last the doors were pushed apart and they came out, Allan with his hand on Bernal's shoulder.

"There's your bag—now hurry upstairs—the maid will show you where."

As Bernal went out, Nancy looked up at her husband with a manner curiously quiet.

"Well, Nance—" He stepped to the door to see if Bernal was out of hearing—"Bernal pleases me in the way he talks about the old gentleman's estate. Either he is most reasonable, or I have never known my true power over men."

Her face was inscrutable. Indeed, she only half heard.

"Mrs. Covil has been telling me some of your broader views on divorce."

The words shot from her lips with the crispness of an arrow, going straight to the bull's-eye.

He glanced quickly at her, the hint of a frown drawing about his eyes.

"Mrs. Covil should have been more discreet. The authority of a priest in these matters is a thing of delicate adjustment—the law for one may not be the law for all. These are not matters to gossip of."

"So it seems. I was thinking of your opposite counsel to Mrs. Eversley."

"There—really, you know I read minds, at times—somehow I knew that would be the next thing you'd speak of."

"Yes?"

"The circumstances are entirely different—I may add that—that any intimation of inconsistency will be very unpleasing to me—very!"

"I can see that the circumstances are different—the Eversleys are not what you would call 'important factors' in the Church—and besides—that is a case of a wife leaving her husband."

"Nance—I'm afraid you're not pleasing me—if I catch your drift. Must I point out the difference—the spiritual difference? That misguided woman wanted to desert her husband merely because he had hurt her pride—her vanity—by certain alleged attentions to other women, concerning the measure of which I had no knowledge. That was a case where the cross must be borne for the true refining of that dross of vanity from her soul. Her husband is of her class, and her life with him will chasten her. While here—what have we here?"

He began to pace the floor as he was wont to do when he prepared a sermon.

"Here we have a flagrant example of what is nothing less than spiritual miscegenation—that's it!—why didn't I think of that phrase before—spiritual miscegenation. A rattle-brained boy, with the connivance of a common magistrate, effects a certain kind of alliance with a person inferior to him in every point of view—birth, breeding, station, culture, wealth—a person, moreover, who will doubtless be glad to relinquish her so-called rights for a sum of money. Can that, I ask you, be called a marriage? Can we suppose an all-wise God to have joined two natures so ill-adapted, so mutually exclusive, so repellent to each other after that first glamour is past. Really, such a supposition is not only puerile but irreverent. It is the conventional supposition, I grant, and theoretically, the unvarying supposition of the Church; but God has given us reasoning powers to use fearlessly—not to be kept superstitiously in the shackles of any tradition whatsoever. Why, the very Church itself from its founding is an example of the wisdom of violating tradition when it shall seem meet—it has always had to do this."

"I see, Allan—every case must be judged by itself; every marriage requires a special ruling—"

"Well—er—exactly—only don't get to fancying that you could solve these problems. It's difficult enough for a priest."

"Oh, I'm positive a mere woman couldn't grapple with them—she hasn't the mind to! All she is capable of is to choose who shall think for her."

"And of course it would hardly do to announce that I had counselled a certain procedure of divorce and re-marriage—no matter how flagrant the abuse, nor how obvious the spiritual equity of the step. People at large are so little analytical."

"'Flexible,' Mr. Browett told his sister you were. He was right—you are flexible, Allan—more so than I ever suspected."

"Nance—you please me—you are a good girl. Now I'm going up to Bernal. Bernal certainly pleases me. Of course I shall do the handsome thing by him if he acts along the lines our talk has indicated."

She still sat in the falling dusk, in the chair she had taken two hours before, when Aunt Bell came in, dressed for dinner.

"Mercy, child! Do you know how late it is?"

"What did you say, Aunt Bell?"

"I say do you know how late it is?"

"Oh—not too late!"

"Not too late—for what?"

There was a pause, then she said: "Aunt Bell, when a woman comes to make her very last effort at self-deception, why does she fling herself into it with such abandon—such pretentious flourishes of remorse—and things? Is it because some under layer of her soul knows it will be the last and will have it a thorough test? I wonder how much of an arrant fraud a woman may really be to herself, even in her surest, happiest moments."

"There you are again, wondering, wondering—instead of accepting things and dressing for dinner. Have you seen Allan?"

"Oh, yes—I've been seeing him for three days—through a glass, darkly."

Aunt Bell flounced on into the library, trailing something perilously near a sniff.

Bernal came down the stairs and stood in the door.

"Well, Nance!" He went to stand before her and she looked up to him. There was still light enough to see his eyes—enough to see, also, that he was embarrassed.

"Well—I've had quite a talk with Allan." He laughed a little constrained, uneasy laugh, looking quickly at her to see if she might be observing him. "He's the same fine old chap, isn't he?" Quickly his eyes again sought her face. "Yes, indeed, he's the same old boy—a great old Allan—only he makes me feel that I have changed, Nance."

She arose from her chair, feeling cramped and restless from sitting so long.

"I'm sure you haven't changed, Bernal."

"Oh, I must have!"

He was looking at her very closely through the dusk.

"Yes, we had an interesting talk," he said again.

He reached out to take one of her hands, which he held an instant in both his own. "He's a rare old Allan, Nance!"



CHAPTER XIII

THE WHEELS WITHIN WHEELS OF THE GREAT MACHINE

For three days the brothers were inseparable. There were so many ancient matters to bring forward of which each could remember but a half; so many new ones, of which each must tell his own story. And there was a matter of finance between them that had been brought forward by Allan without any foolish delay. Each of them spoke to Nancy about it.

"Bernal has pleased me greatly," said her husband. "He agrees that Grandfather Delcher could not have been himself when he made that will—being made as it was directly after he sent Bernal off. He finds it absurd that the old man, so firm a Christian, should have disinherited a Christian, one devoted to the ministry of Jesus, for an unbeliever like Bernal. It is true, I talked to him in this strain myself, and I cannot deny that I wield even a greater influence over men than over women. I dare say I could have brought Bernal around even had he been selfish and stubborn. By putting a proposition forward as a matter of course, one may often induce another to accept it as such, whereas he might dispute it if it were put forward as at all debatable. But as a matter of fact he required no talking to; he accepted my views readily. The boy doesn't seem to know the value of money. I really believe he may decide to make over the whole of the property to me. That is what I call a beautiful unselfishness. But I shall do handsomely by him—probably he can use some money in that cattle business. I had thought first of ten thousand dollars, but doubtless half that will be wiser. I shall insist upon his taking at least half that. He will find that unselfishness is a game two can play at."

Nancy had listened to this absently, without comment. Nor had Bernal moved her to speech when he said, "You know, Allan is such a sensitive old chap—you wouldn't guess how sensitive. His feelings were actually hurt because I'd kept him out of grandad's money all these years. He'd forgotten that I didn't know I was doing it. Of course the old boy was thinking what he'd have done in my place—but I think I can make it right with him—I'm sure now he knows I didn't mean to wrong him."

Yet during this speech he had shot furtive little questioning looks at her face, as if to read those thoughts he knew she would not put into words.

But she only smiled at Bernal. Her husband, however, found her more difficult than ever after communicating his news to her. He tried once to imagine her being dissatisfied with him for some reason. But this attempt he abandoned. Thereafter he attributed her coldness, aloofness, silence, and moodiness to some nervous malady peculiar to the modern woman. Bernal's presence kept him from noting how really pronounced and unwavering her aversion had become.

Nor did Bernal note her attitude. Whatever he may have read in Allan at those times when the look of cold appraisement was turned full upon him, he had come to know of his brother's wife only that she was Nancy of the old days, strangely surviving to greet him and be silent with him, or to wonder with him when he came in out of that preposterous machine of many wheels that they called the town. No one but Nancy saw anything about it to wonder at.

To Bernal, after his years in the big empty places, it was a part of all the world and of all times compacted in a small space. One might see in it ancient Jerusalem, Syria, Persia, Rome and modern Babylon—with something still peculiar and unclassifiable that one would at length have to call New York. And to make it more absorbing, the figures were always moving. Where so many were pressed together each was weighted by a thousand others—the rich not less than the poor; each was stirred to quick life and each was being visibly worn down by the ceaseless friction.

When he had walked the streets for a week, he saw the city as a huge machine, a machine to which one might not even deliver a message without becoming a part of it—a wheel of it. It was a machine always readjusting, always perfecting, always repairing itself—casting out worn or weak parts and taking in others—ever replacing old wheels with new ones, and never disdaining any new wheel that found its place—that could give its cogs to the general efficiency, consenting to be worn down by the unceasing friction.

Looking down Broadway early one evening—a shining avenue of joy—he thought of the times when he had gazed across a certain valley of his West and dreamed of bringing a message to this spot.

Against the sky many electric signs flamed garishly. Beneath them were the little grinding wheels of the machine—satisfied, joyous, wisely sufficient unto themselves, needing no message—least of all the simple old truth he had to give. He tried to picture his message blazing against the sky among the other legends: from where he stood the three most salient were the names of a popular pugilist, a malt beverage and a theatre. The need of another message was not apparent.

So he laughed at himself and went down into the crowd foregathered in ways of pleasure, and there he drank of the beer whose name was flaunted to the simple stars. Truly a message to this people must be put into a sign of electric bulbs; into a phonograph to be listened to for a coin, with an automatic banjo accompaniment; or it must be put upon the stage to be acted or sung or danced! Otherwise he would be a wheel rejected—a wheel ground up in striving to become a part of the machine at a place where no wheel was needed.

For another experience cooling to his once warm hopes, the second day of his visit Allan had taken him to his weekly Ministers' Meeting—an affair less formidable than its title might imply.

A dozen or so good fellows of the cloth had luncheon together each Tuesday at the house of one or another, or at a restaurant; and here they talked shop or not as they chose, the thing insisted upon being congeniality—that for once in the week they should be secure from bores.

Here Presbyterian and Unitarian met on common ground; Baptist, Catholic, Episcopalian, Congregationalist, Methodist—all became brothers over the soup. Weekly they found what was common and helpful to all in discussing details of church administration, matters of faith, methods of handling their charitable funds; or the latest heresy trial. They talked of these things amiably, often lightly. They were choice spirits relaxed, who might be grave or gay, as they listed.

Their vein was not too serious the day Bernal was his brother's guest, sitting between the very delightful Father Riley and the exciting Unitarian, one Whittaker. With tensest interest he listened to their talk.

At first there was a little of Delitzsch and his Babel-Bible addresses, brought up by Selmour, an amiable Presbyterian of shining bare pate and cheerful red beard, a man whom scandal had filliped ever so coyly with a repute of leanings toward Universalism.

This led to a brief discussion of the old and new theology—Princeton standing for the old with its definition of Christianity as "a piece of information given supernaturally and miraculously"; Andover standing for the new—so alleged Whittaker—with many polite and ingenious evasions of this proposition without actually repudiating it.

The Unitarian, however, was held to be the least bit too literal in his treatment of propositions not his own.

Then came Pleydell, another high-church Episcopalian who, over his chop and a modest glass of claret, declared earnest war upon the whole Hegel-Darwinian-Wellhausen school. His method of attack was to state baldly the destructive conclusions of that school—that most of the books of the Old Testament are literary frauds, intentionally misrepresenting the development of religion in Israel; that the whole Mosaic code is a later fabrication and its claim to have been given in the wilderness an historical falsehood. From this he deduced that a mere glance at the Bible, as the higher critics explain it, must convince the earnest Christian that he can have no share in their views. "Deprive Christianity of its supernatural basis," he said, "and you would have a mere speculative philosophy. Deny the Fall of Man in the Garden of Eden, and the Atonement becomes meaningless. If we have not incurred God's wrath through Adam's disobedience, we need no Saviour. That is the way to meet the higher criticism," he concluded earnestly.

As the only rule of the association was that no man should talk long upon any matter, Floud, the fiery and aggressive little Baptist, hereupon savagely reviewed a late treatise on the ethnic Trinities, put out by a professor of ecclesiastical history in a New England theological seminary. Floud marvelled that this author could retain his orthodox standing, for he viewed the Bible as a purely human collection of imperfect writings, the wonder-stories concerning the birth and death of Jesus as deserving no credence, and denied to Christianity any supernatural foundation. Polytheism was shown to be the soil from which all trinitarian conceptions naturally spring—the Brahmanic, Zoroastrian, Homeric, Plotinian, as well as the Christian trinity—the latter being a Greek idea engrafted on a Jewish stalk. The author's conclusion, by which he reached "an undogmatic gospel of the spirit, independent of all creeds and forms—a gospel of love to God and man, with another Trinity of Love, Truth and Freedom," was particularly irritating to the disturbed Baptist, who spoke bitterly of the day having dawned when the Church's most dangerous enemies were those critical vipers whom she had warmed in her own bosom.

Suffield, the gaunt, dark, but twinkling-eyed Methodist, also sniffed at the conclusion of the ethnic-trinities person. "We have an age of substitutes," he remarked. "We have had substitutes for silk and sealskin—very creditable substitutes, so I have been assured by a lady in whom I have every confidence—substitutes for coffee, for diamonds—substitutes for breakfast which are widely advertised—substitutes for medicine—and now we are coming to have substitutes for religion—even a substitute for hell!"

Hereupon he told of a book he had read, also written by an orthodox professor of theology, in which the argument, advanced upon scriptural evidence, was that the wicked do not go into endless torment, but ultimately shrivel and sink into a state of practical unconsciousness. Yet the author had been unable to find any foundation for universalism. This writer, Suffield explained, holds that the curtain falls after the judgment on a lost world. Nor is there probation for the soul after the body dies. The Scriptures teach the ruin of the final rejecters of Christ; Christ teaches plainly that they who reject the Gospel will perish in the endless darkness of night. But eternal punishment does not necessarily mean eternal suffering; hence the hypothesis of the soul gradually shrivelling for the sin of its unbelief.

The amiable Presbyterian sniffed at this as a sentimental quibble. Punishment ceases to be punishment when it is not felt—one cannot punish a tree or an unconscious soul. But this was the spirit of the age. With the fires out in hell, no wonder we have an age of sugar-candy morality and cheap sentimentalism.

But here the Unitarian wickedly interrupted, to remind his Presbyterian brother that his own church had quenched those very certain fires that once burned under the pit in which lay the souls of infants unbaptised.

The amiable Presbyterian, not relishing this, still amiably threw the gauntlet down to Father Riley, demanding the Catholic view of the future of unbaptised children.

The speech of the latter was a mellow joy—a south breeze of liquid consonants and lilting vowels finely articulated. Perhaps it was not a little owing to the good man's love for what he called "oiling the rusty hinges of the King's English with a wee drop of the brogue"; but, if so, the oil was so deftly spread that no one word betrayed its presence. Rather was his whole speech pervaded by this soft delight, especially when his cherubic face, his pink cheeks glistening in certain lights with a faint silvery stubble of beard, mellowed with his gentle smile. It was so now, even when he spoke of God's penalties for the souls of reprobate infants.

"All theologians of the Mother Church are agreed," replied the gracious father, "first, that infants dying unbaptised are excluded from the Kingdom of Heaven. Second, that they will not enjoy the beatific vision outside of heaven. Third, that they will arise with adults and be assembled for judgment on the last day. And, fourth, that after the last day there will be but two states, namely: a state of supernatural and supreme felicity and a state of what, in a wide sense, we may call damnation."

Purlingly the good man went on to explain that damnation is a state admitting of many degrees; and that the unbaptised infant would not suffer in that state the same punishment as the adult reprobate. While the latter would suffer positive pains of mind and body for his sins, the unfortunate infant would doubtless suffer no pain of sense whatever. As to their being exempt from the pain of loss, grieving over their exclusion from the sight of God and the glories of His Kingdom, it is more commonly held that they do not suffer even this; that even if they know others are happier than themselves, they are perfectly resigned to God's will and suffer no pain of loss in regard to happiness not suited to their condition.

The Presbyterian called upon them to witness that his church was thus not unique in attaining this sentimentality regarding reprobate infants.

Then little Floud cited the case of still another heretic within the church, a professor in a western Methodist university, who declared that biblical infallibility is a superstitious and hurtful tradition; that all the miracles are mere poetic fancies, incredible and untrue—even irreverent; and that all spiritual truth comes to man through his brain and conscience. Modern preaching, according to the book of this heretic, lacks power because so many churches cling to the tradition that the Bible is infallible. It is the golden calf of their worship; the palpable lie that gives the ring of insincerity to all their moral exhortations.

So the talk flowed on until the good men agreed that a peculiarity of the time lay in this: that large numbers of ministers within the church were publishing the most revolutionary heresies while still clinging to some shred of their tattered orthodoxy.

Also they decided that it would not be without interest to know what belief is held by the man of common education and intelligence—the man who behaves correctly but will not go to church.

Here Father Riley sweetly reminded them—"No questions are asked in the Mother Church, gentlemen, that may not be answered with authority. In your churches, without an authority superior to mere reason, destructive questions will be asked more and more frequently."

Gravely they agreed that the church was losing its hold on the people. That but for its social and charitable activities, its state would be alarming.

"Your churches!" Father Riley corrected with suave persistence. "No church can endure without an infallible head."

Again and again during the meal Bernal had been tempted to speak. But each time he had been restrained by a sense of his aloofness. These men, too, were wheels within the machine, each revolving as he must. They would simply pity him, or be amused.

More and more acutely was he coming to feel the futility, the crass, absurd presumption of what he had come back to undertake. From the lucid quiet of his mountain haunts he had descended into a vale where antiquated cymbals clashed in wild discordance above the confusing clatter of an intricate machinery—machinery too complicated to be readjusted by a passing dreamer. In his years of solitude he had grown to believe that the teachers of the world were no longer dominated by that ancient superstition of a superhumanly malignant God. He had been prepared to find that the world-ideal had grown more lofty in his absence, been purified by many eliminations into a God who, as he had once said to Nance, could no more spare the soul of a Hottentot than the soul of a pope. Yet here was a high type of the priest of the Mother Church, gentle, Godly, learned, who gravely and as one having authority told how God would blight forever the soul of a child unbaptised, thus imputing to Deity a regard for mechanical rites that would constitute even a poor human father an incredible monster.

Yet the marvel of it seemed to him to lie in this: that the priest himself lived actually a life of loving devotion and sacrifice in marked opposition to this doctrine of formal cruelty; that his church, more successfully than any other in Christendom, had met the needs of humanity, coming closer to men in their sin and sickness, ministering to them with a deeper knowledge, a more affectionate intimacy, than any other. That all these men of God should hold formally to dogmas belying the humaneness of their actual practise—here was the puzzling anomaly that might well give pause to any casual message-bringer. Struggle as he might, it was like a tangling mesh cast over him—this growing sense of his own futility.

Along with this conviction of his powerlessness there came to him a new sense of reliance upon Nancy. Unconsciously at first he turned to her for sunlight, big views and quiet power, for the very stimulus he had been wont to draw from the wide, high reaches of his far-off valley. Later, came a conscious turning, an open-eyed bringing of all his needs, to lay them in her waiting lap. Then it was he saw that on that first night at Edom her confidence and enthusiasm had been things he leaned upon quite naturally, though unwittingly. The knowledge brought him a vague unrest. Furtive, elusive impulses, borne to him on the wings of certain old memories—memories once resolutely put away in the face of his one, big world-desire—now came to trouble him.

It seemed that one must forever go in circles. With fine courage he had made straight off to toil up the high difficult paths of the ideal. Never had he consciously turned, nor even swerved. Yet here he was at length upon his old tracks, come again to the wondering girl.

Did it mean, then, that his soul was baffled—or did it mean that his soul would not suffer him to baffle it, try as he might? Was that girl of the old days to greet him with her wondering eyes at the end of every high path? These and many other questions he asked himself.

At the close of this day he sought her, eager for the light of her understanding eyes—for a certain waiting sympathy she never withheld. As she looked up now with a kind of composed gladness, it seemed to him that they two alone, out of all the world, were sanely quiet. Silently he sank into a chair near her and they sat long thus, feeling no need of words. At last she spoke.

"Are you coming nearer to it, Bernal?"

He laughed.

"I'm farther away than ever, Nance. Probably there's but one creature in this city to-day as out of place as I am. He's a big, awkward, country-looking dog, and he was lost on Broadway. Did you ever see a lost dog in a city street? This fellow was actually in a panic, wholly demoralised, and yet he seemed to know that he must conceal it for his own safety. So he affected a fine air of confidence, of being very busy about an engagement for which he feared he might be late. He would trot swiftly along for half a block, then pause as if trying to recall the street number; then trot a little farther, and stop to look back as if the other party to his engagement might happen along from that direction. It was a splendid bit of acting, and it deceived them all, in that street of mutterers and hard faces. He was like one of them, busy and hurried, but apparently cool, capable, and ominously alert. Only, in his moments of indecision, his eyes shifted the least bit nervously, as if to note whether the real fear he felt were detected, and then I could read all his secret consternation.

"I'm the same lost dog, Nance. I feel as he felt every time I go into that street where the poor creatures hurry and talk to themselves from sheer nervous fatigue."

He ceased speaking, but she remained silent, fearing lest she say too little or too much.

"Nance," he said presently with a slow, whimsical glance, "I'm beginning to suspect that I'm even more of a fool than Hoover thought me—and he was rather enthusiastic about it, I assure you!"

To which she at length answered musingly:

"If God makes us fools, doubtless he likes to have us thorough. Be a great fool, Bernal. Don't be a small one."



CHAPTER XIV

THE INEFFECTIVE MESSAGE

The week had gone while he walked in the crowds, feeling his remoteness; but he knew at last that he was not of the brotherhood of the zealots; that the very sense of humour by which he saw the fallacies of one zealot prevented him from becoming another. He lacked the zealot's conviction of his unique importance, yet one must be such a zealot to give a message effectively. He began to see that the world could not be lost; that whatever might be vital in his own message would, soon or late, be delivered by another. The time mattered not. Could he not be as reposeful, as patient, as God?

In spite of which, the impulse to speak his little word would recur; and it came upon him stoutly one day on his way up town. As the elevated train slowly rounded a curve he looked into the open window of a room where a gloomy huddle of yellow-faced, sunken-cheeked, brown-bearded men bent their heads over busy sewing-machines. Nearest the window, full before it, was one that touched him—a young man with some hardy spirit of hope still enduring in his starved face, some stubborn refusal to recognise the odds against him. And fixed to his machine, where his eyes might now and then raise to it from his work, was a spray of lilac—his little spirit flaunting itself gaily even from the cross. The pathos of it was somehow intensified by the grinding of the wheels that carried him by it.

The train creaked its way around the curve—but the face dreaming happily over the lilac spray in that hopeless room stayed in his mind, coercing him.

As he entered the house, Nancy met him.

"Do go and be host to those men. It's our day for the Ministers' Meeting," she continued, as he looked puzzled, "and just as they sat down Allan was called out to one of his people who is sick. Now run like a good boy and 'tend to them."

So it came that, while the impulse was still strong upon him, he went in among the dozen amiable, feeding gentlemen who were not indisposed to listen to whomsoever might talk—if he did not bore—which is how it befell that they had presently cause to remark him.

Not at first, for he mumbled hesitatingly, without authority of manner or point to his words, but the phrase, "the fundamental defect of the Christian religion" caused even the Unitarian to gasp over his glass of mineral water. His green eyes glittered pleasantly upon Bernal from his dark face with its scraggly beard.

"That's it, Mr. Linford—tell us that—we need to know that—do we not, gentlemen?"

"Speak for yourself, Whittaker," snapped the aggressive little Baptist, "but doubtless Mr. Linford has something to say."

Bernal remained unperturbed by this. Very earnestly he continued: "Christianity is defective, judged even by poor human standards; untrue by the plain facts of human consciousness."

"Ah! Now we shall learn!" Father Riley turned his most gracious smile upon the speaker.

"Your churches are losing their hold upon men because your religion is one of separation, here and hereafter—while the one great tendency of the age is toward brotherhood—oneness. Primitive man had individual pride—family pride, city pride, state pride, national pride followed—but we are coming now to the only permissible pride, a world pride—in which the race feels its oneness. We are nearly there; even now the spirit that denies this actual brotherhood is confined to the churches. The people outside more generally than you dream know that God does not discriminate among religions—that he has a scheme of a dignity so true that it can no more permit the loss of one black devil-worshipper than that of the most magnificent of archbishops."

He stopped, looking inquiringly—almost wistfully, at them.

Various polite exclamations assured him of their interest.

"Continue, by all means," urged Whittaker. "I feel that you will have even Father Riley edified in a moment."

"The most cynical chap—even for a Unitarian," purled that good man.

Bernal resumed.

"Your God is a tribal God who performed his wonders to show that he had set a difference between Israel and Egypt. Your Saviour continues to set the same difference: Israel being those who believed his claim to Godship; Egypt those who find his evidence insufficient. But we humans daily practise better than this preaching of retaliation. The Church is losing power because your creeds are fixed while man, never ceasing to grow, has inevitably gone beyond them—even beyond the teachings of your Saviour who threatened to separate father from son and mother from daughter—who would distinguish sheep from goats by the mere intellectual test of the opinion they formed of his miracles. The world to-day insists on moral tests—which Christianity has never done."

"Ah—now we are getting at it," remarked the Methodist, whose twinkling eyes curiously belied his grimly solemn face. "Who was it that wished to know the belief of the average unbeliever?"

"The average unbeliever," answered Bernal promptly, "no longer feels the need of a Saviour—he knows that he must save himself. He no longer believes in the God who failed always, from Eden to Calvary, failed even to save his chosen tribe by that last device of begetting a son of a human mother who should be sacrificed to him. He no longer believes that he must have a mediator between himself and that God."

"Really, most refreshing," chortled Father Riley. "More, more!" and he rapped for silence.

"The man of to-day must have a God who never fails. Disguise it as you will, your Christian God was never loved. No God can be loved who threatens destruction for not loving him. We cannot love one whom we are not free not to love."

"Where shall we find this God—outside of Holy Writ," demanded Floud, who had once or twice restrained himself with difficulty, in spite of his amusement.

"The true God comes to life in your own consciousness, if you will clear it of the blasphemous preconceptions imposed by Christianity," answered Bernal so seriously that no one had the heart to interrupt him. "Of course we can never personify God save as a higher power of self. Moses did no more; Jesus did no more. And if we could stop with this—be content with saying 'God is better than the best man'—we should have a formula permitting endless growth, even as He permits it to us. God has been more generous to us than the Church has been to Him. While it has limited Him to that god of bloody sacrifice conceived by a barbaric Jew, He has permitted us to grow so that now any man who did not surpass him morally, as the scriptures portray him, would be a man of inconceivable malignity.

"You see the world has demonstrated facts that disprove the Godship of your God and your Saviour. We have come, indeed, into a sense of such certain brotherhood that we know your hell is a falsity. We know—a knowledge of even the rudiments of psychology proves—that there will be a hell for all as long as one of us is there. Our human nature is such that one soul in hell would put every other soul there. Daily this becomes more apparent. We grow constantly more sensitive to the pain of others. This is the distinctive feature of modern growth—our increasing tendency to find the sufferings of others intolerable to ourselves. A disaster now is felt around the world—we burn or starve or freeze or drown with our remote brothers—and we do what we can to relieve them because we suffer with them. It seems to me the existence of the S.P.C.A. proves that hell is either for all of us or for none of us—because of our oneness. If the suffering of a stray cat becomes our suffering, do you imagine that the minority of the race which Christianity saves could be happy knowing that the great majority lay in torment?

"Suppose but two were left in hell—Judas Iscariot and Herbert Spencer—the first great sinner after Jesus and the last of any consequence. One betrayed his master and the other did likewise, only with far greater subtlety and wickedness—teaching thousands to disbelieve his claims to godhood—to regard Christianity as a crude compound of Greek mythology and Jewish tradition—a thing built of myth and fable. Even if these two were damned and all the rest were saved—can you not see that a knowledge of their suffering would embitter heaven itself to another hell? Father Riley was good enough to tell us last week of the state of unbaptised infants after death. Will you please consider coldly the infinite, good God setting a difference for all eternity between two babies, because over the hairless pate of one a priest had sprinkled water and spoken words? Can you not see that this is untrue because it is absurd to our God-given senses of humour and justice? Do you not see that such a God, in the act of separating those children, taking into heaven the one that had had its little head wetted by a good man, and sending the reprobate into what Father Riley terms, 'in a wide sense, a state of damnation'—"

Father Riley smiled upon him with winning sweetness.

"—do you not see that such a God would be shamed off his throne and out of heaven by the pitying laugh that would go up—even from sinners?

"You insist that the truth touching faith and morals is in your Bible, despite its historical inaccuracies. But do you not see that you are losing influence with the world because this is not so—because a higher standard of ethics than yours prevails out in the world—a demand for a veritable fatherhood of God and a veritable brotherhood of man—to replace the caricatures of those doctrines that Christianity submits."

"Our young friend seems to think exceeding well of human nature," chirped Father Riley.

"Yes," rejoined Bernal. "Isn't it droll that this poor, fallen human nature, despised and reviled, 'conceived in sin and born in iniquity,' should at last call the Christian God and Saviour to account, weigh them by its own standard, find them wanting, and replace them with a greater God born of itself? Is not that an eloquent proof of the living God that abides in us?"

"Has it ever occurred to you, young man, that human nature has its selfish moments?" asked the high-church rector—between sips of claret and water.

"Has it ever occurred to you that human nature has any but selfish moments?" replied Bernal. "If so, your impression was incorrect."

"Really, Mr. Linford, have you not just been telling us how glorious is this nature of man—"

"I know—I will explain to you," he went on, moving Father Riley to another indulgent smile by his willingness to instruct the gray-bearded Congregationalist who had interrupted.

"When I saw that there must be a hell for all so long as there is a hell for one—even for Spencer—I suddenly saw there was nothing in any man to merit the place—unless it were the ignorance of immaturity. For I saw that man by the very first law of his being can never have any but a selfish motive. Here again practical psychology sustains me. You cannot so much as raise your hand without an intention to promote your happiness—nor are you less selfish if you give your all to the needy—you are still equally doing that which promotes your happiness. That it is more blessed to give than to receive is a terse statement of a law scientifically demonstrable. You all know how far more exquisite is the pleasure that comes from giving than that which comes from receiving. Is not one who prefers to give then simply selfish with a greater wisdom, a finer skill for the result desired—his own pleasure? The man we call good is not less selfish than the man we call bad—only wiser in the ways that bring his happiness—riper in that divine sensitiveness to the feelings of his brother. Selfish happiness is equally a law with all, though it send one of us to thieving and another to the cross.

"Ignorance of this primary truth has kept the world in spiritual darkness—it has nurtured belief in sin—in a devil, in a God that permits evil. For when you tell me that my assertion is a mere quibble—that it matters not whether we call a man unselfish or wisely selfish—you fail to see that, when we understand this truth, there is no longer any sin. 'Sin' is then seen to be but a mistaken notion of what brings happiness. Last night's burglar and your bishop differ not morally but intellectually—one knowing surer ways of achieving his own happiness, being more sensitive to that oneness of the race which thrills us all in varying degrees. When you know this—that the difference is not moral but intellectual, self-righteousness disappears and with it a belief in moral difference—the last obstacle to the realisation of our oneness. It is in the church that this fiction of moral difference has taken its final stand.

"And not only shall we have no full realisation of the brotherhood of man until this inevitable, equal selfishness is understood, but we shall have no rational conception of virtue. There will be no sound morality until it is taught for its present advantage to the individual, and not for what it may bring him in a future world. Not until then will it be taught effectively that the well-being of one is inextricably bound up with the well-being of all; that while man is always selfish, his selfish happiness is still contingent on the happiness of his brother."

The moment of coffee had come. The Unitarian lighted a black cigar and avidly demanded more reasons why the Christian religion was immoral.

"Still for the reason that it separates," continued Bernal, "separates not only hereafter but here. We have kings and serfs, saints and sinners, soldiers to kill one another—God is still a God of Battle. There is no Christian army that may not consistently invoke your God's aid to destroy any other Christian army—none whose spiritual guides do not pray to God for help in the work of killing other Christians. So long as you have separation hereafter, you will have these absurd divisions here. So long as you preach a Saviour who condemns to everlasting punishment for disbelief, so long you will have men pointing to high authority for all their schemes of revenge and oppression here.

"Not until you preach a God big enough to save all can you arouse men to the truth that all must be saved. Not until you have a God big enough to love all can you have a church big enough to hold all.

"An Indian in a western town must have mastered this truth. He had watched a fight between drunken men in which one shot the other. He said to me, 'When I see how bad some of my brothers are, I know how good the Great Spirit must be to love them all!'"

"Was—was he a member of any church?" inquired the amiable Presbyterian, with a facetious gleam in his eyes.

"I didn't ask him—of course we know he wasn't a Presbyterian."

Hereupon Father Riley and the wicked Unitarian both laughed joyously. Then the Congregationalist, gazing dreamily through the smoke of his cigarette, remarked, "You have omitted any reference to the great fact of Christianity—the sacrifice of the Son of Man."

"Very well, I will tell you about it," answered the young man quite earnestly, whereat the Unitarian fairly glowed with wicked anticipations.

"Let us face that so-called sacrifice honestly. Jesus died to save those who could accept his claim to god-ship—believing that he would go to sit at the right hand of God to judge the world. But look—an engineer out here the other day died a horrible death to save the lives of a scant fifty people—their mere physical lives—died out of that simple sense of oneness which makes us selfishly fear for the suffering of others—died without any hope of superior exaltation hereafter. Death of this sort is common. I would not belittle him you call the Saviour—as a man he is most beautiful and moving to me—but that shall not blind me to the fact that the sacrificial element in his death is surpassed daily by common, dull humans."

A veiled uneasiness was evident on the part of his listeners, but the speaker gave no heed.

"This spectacle of sacrifice, of devotion to others, is needed as an uplift," he went on earnestly, "but why dwell upon one remote—obscured by claims of a God-jugglery which belittle it if they be true—when all about you are countless plain, unpretentious men and women dying deaths and—what is still greater,—living lives of cool, relentless devotion out of sheer human love.

"Preach this divineness of human nature and you will once more have a living church. Preach that our oneness is so real that the best man is forever shackled to the worst. Preach that sin is but ignorant selfishness, less admirable than virtue only as ignorance is less admirable than knowledge.

"In these two plain laws—the individual's entire and unvarying selfishness and his ever-increasing sensitiveness to the sufferings of others—there is the promise not of a heaven and a hell, but of a heaven for all—which is what the world is more and more emphatically demanding—which it will eventually produce even here—for we have as little sensed the possibilities of man's life here as we have divined the attributes of God himself.

"Once you drove away from your church the big men, the thinkers, the fearless—the souls God must love most truly were it possible to conceive him setting a difference among his creatures. Now you drive away even the merely intelligent rabble. The average man knows your defect—knows that one who believes Christ rose from the dead is not by that fact the moral superior of one who believes he did not; knows, indeed, of God, that he cannot be a fussy, vain, blustering creature who is forever failing and forever visiting the punishment for his failures upon his puppets.

"This is why you are no longer considered a factor in civilisation, save as a sort of police-guard upon the very ignorant. And you are losing this prestige. Even the credulous day-labourer has come to weigh you and find you wanting—is thrilling with his own God-assurance and stepping forth to save himself as best he can.

"But, if you would again draw man, heat him, weld him, hold him—preach Man to him, show him his own goodness instead of loading him with that vicious untruth of his conception in iniquity. Preach to him the limitless devotion of his common dull brothers to one another through their sense of oneness. Show him the common beautiful, wonderful, selfish self-giving of humanity, not for an hour or for a day, but for long hard life-times. Preach the exquisite adjustment of that human nature which must always seek its own happiness, yet is slowly finding that that happiness depends on the happiness of all. The lives of daily crucifixion without hope of reward are abundant all about you—you all know them. And if once you exploit these actual sublimities of human nature—of the man in the street—no tale of devotion in Holy Writ will ever again move you as these do. And when you have preached this long enough, then will take place in human society, naturally, spontaneously, that great thing which big men have dreamed of doing with their artificial devices of socialism and anarchism. For when you have demonstrated the race's eternal oneness man will be as little tempted to oppress, starve, enslave, murder or separate his brothers as he is now tempted to mutilate his own body. Then only will he love his neighbor as himself—still with a selfish love.

"Preach Man to man as a discovery in Godhood. You will not revive the ancient glories of your Church, but you will build a new church to a God for whom you will not need to quibble or evade or apologise. Then you will make religion the one force, and you will rally to it those great minds whose alienation has been both your reproach and your embarrassment. You will enlist not only the scientist but the poet—and all between. You will have a God to whom all confess instinctively."



CHAPTER XV

THE WOMAN AT THE END OF THE PATH

He stopped, noticing that the chairs were pushed back. There was an unmistakeable air of boredom, though one or two of the men still smoked thoughtfully. One of these, indeed—the high church rector—even came back with a question, to the undisguised apprehension of several brothers.

"You have formulated a certain fashion of belief, Mr. Linford, one I dare say appealing to minds that have not yet learned that even reason must submit to authority; but you must admit that this revelation of God in the human heart carries no authoritative assurance of immortality."

Bernal had been sitting in some embarrassment, dismayed at his own vehemence, but this challenge stirred him.

"True," he answered, "but let us thank God for uncertainty, if it take the place of Christian belief in a sparsely peopled heaven and a crowded hell."

"Really, you know—"

"I know nothing of a future life; but I prefer ignorance to a belief that the most heinous baby that ever died in sin is to languish in a state of damnation—even 'in a wide sense' as our good friend puts it."

"But, surely, that is the first great question of all people in all ages—'If a man die shall he live again?'

"Because there has never been any dignified conception of a Supreme Being. I have tried to tell you what my own faith is—faith in a God wiser and more loving than I am, who, being so, has devised no mean little scheme of revenge such as you preach. A God more loving than my own human father, a God whose plan is perfect whether it involve my living or dying. Whether I shall die to life or to death is not within my knowledge; but since I know of a truth that the God I believe in must have a scheme of worth and dignity, I am unconcerned. Whether his plan demand extinction or immortality, I worship him for it, not holding him to any trivial fancy of mine. God himself can be no surer of his plan's perfection than I am. I call this faith—faith the more perfect that it is without condition, asking neither sign nor miracle."

"And life is so good that I've no time to whine. If this ego of mine is presently to become unnecessary in the great Plan, my faith is still triumphant. It would be interesting to know the end, but it's not so important as to know that I am no better—only a little wiser in certain ways—than yesterday's murderer. Living under the perfect plan of a perfect Creator, I need not trouble about hidden details when so many not hidden are more vital. When, in some far-off future, we learn to live here as fully and beautifully as we have power to, I doubt not that in the natural ways of growth we shall learn more of this detail of life we call 'death'—but I can imagine nothing of less consequence to one who has faith.

"I saw a stanza the other day that tells it well:

"'We know not whence is life, nor whither death, Know not the Power that circumscribes our breath. But yet we do not fear; what made us men, What gave us love, shall we not trust again?'"

While quoting the lines his eyes had been straight ahead, absently dwelling upon the space between the slightly parted doors that gave into the next room. But even as he spoke, the last line faltered and halted. His glance slowly stiffened out of widening eyes to the face it had caught there—a face new, strange, mesmeric, that all at once enchained him soul and body. With a splendid, reckless might it assailed him—left him dazed, deaf, speechless.

It was the face of Nancy, for the first time all its guards down. Full upon him flamed the illumined eyes that made the face a yielding radiance; lifted a little was the chin of gentle curves, the under lip caught as if in that quivering eagerness she no longer breathed—the face of Nancy, no longer wondering, Nancy at last compelled and compelling. A moment the warm light flashed from each to each.

He stopped in a sudden bewilderment, looking blankly, questioningly at the faces about him. Then out of the first chaos came the sense of having awakened from some long, quiet sleep—of having suddenly opened his eyes upon a world from which the morning mists had lifted, to see himself—and the woman who stood always at the end of that upward path—face to face for the first time. One by one his outer sensations returned. At first he heard a blurred murmuring, then he became aware that some of the men were looking at him curiously, that one of them had addressed him. He smiled apologetically.

"I beg your pardon. I—I couldn't have been listening."

"I merely asked," repeated Floud, "how you expect to satisfy humanity with the vague hope that you would substitute for the Christian promise of eternal life."

He stared stupidly at the questioner.

"I—I don't know." He passed a hand slowly upward over his forehead. "Really I can hardly trouble about those matters—there's so much life to live. I think I knew a moment ago, but I seem to have forgotten, though it's doubtless no great loss. I dare say it's more important to be unafraid of life than to be unafraid of death."

"You were full of reasons a moment ago," reminded Whittaker—"some of them not uninteresting."

"Was I? Oh, well, it's a small matter—I've somehow lost hold of it." He laughed awkwardly. "It seems to have come to me just now that those who study an apple until it falls from its stem and rots are even more foolish than those who pluck and eat."

Again he was silent, with a great hidden impatience for them to be gone. But Whittaker, the wicked Unitarian, detained them still a moment longer.

"How hardly we should believe in a God who saved every one!" he breathed softly to the remains of his cigar.

"Humph! Such a God would be a mere mush of concession!" retorted Floud, the Baptist.

"And how true," pursued the unruffled Unitarian, "that we cannot worship a 'mere mush of concession'—how true that our God must hate what we hate, and punish what we would punish. We might stomach a God who would save orthodox burglars along with orthodox bishops, but not one who saved unbaptised infants and adults of unsound doctrine. Dear, dear, yes! We must have a God with a little human spite in Him or He seems to be spineless."

"A hopeless cynic," declared the soft voice of the Catholic—"it's the Unitarianism working out of him, mind you!"

"So glad to have met you!" continued the same good man to Bernal. "Your words are conducive to thought—you're an earnest, decent lad at all events."

But Bernal scarcely heard them or identified the speakers. They were to him but so many noisy wheels of the vast machine, each revolving as it must. His whole body seemed to send electric sparks of repulsion out to them to drive them away as quickly as might be. All his energies were centred to one mighty impulse.

At last the door closed and he stood alone with the disordered table and the pushed back chairs, doggedly gathering himself. Then he went to the doors and with a hand to each, pushed them swiftly apart.

She stood at the farther side of the room. She seemed to have fled there, and yet she leaned toward him breathless, again with the under lip caught fast in its quivering—helpless, piteously helpless. It was this that stayed him. Had she utterly shrunk away, even had he found her denying, defiant—the aroused man had prevailed. But seeing her so, he caught at the back of a chair as if to hold himself. Then he gazed long and exultingly into the eyes yielded so abjectly to his. For a moment it filled him to see and know, to be certain that she knew and did not deny. But the man in him was not yet a reasoning man—too lately had he come to life.

He stepped eagerly toward her, to halt only when one weak white hand faltered up with absurd pretension of a power to ward him off. Nor was it her hand that made him stop then. That barrier confessed its frailness in every drooping line. Again it was the involuntary submission of her whole poise—she had actually leaned a little further toward him when he started, even as her hand went up. But the helpless misery in her eyes was still a defense, passive but sufficient.

Then she spoke and his tension relaxed a little, the note of helpless suffering in her voice making him wince and fall back a step.

"Bernal, Bernal, Bernal! It hurts me so, hurts me so! It's the Gratcher—isn't it hurting you, too? Oh, it must be!"

He retreated a little, again grasping the back of the chair with one hand, but there was no restraint in his voice.

"Laugh, Nance, laugh! You know what laughing does to them!"

"Not to this one, Bernal—oh, not to this one!"

"But it's only a Gratcher, Nance! I've been asleep all these years. Now I'm awake. I'm in the world again—here, do you understand, before you. And it's a glad, good world. I'm full of its life—and I've money—think of that! Yesterday I didn't know what money was. I was going to throw it away—throw it away as lightly as I threw away all those good, precious years. How much it seems now, and what fine, powerful stuff it is! And I, like a sleeping fool, was about to let it go at a mere suggestion from Allan."

He stopped, as if under the thrust of a cold, keen blade.



"Allan—Allan!" he repeated dazedly while the look of pain deepened in the woman's eyes. He stared back at her dumbly. Then another awakening became visible in him and he laughed awkwardly.

"It's funny, Nance—funny—and awful! Do you know that not until I spoke his name then had a thought of Allan come to me? Can you comprehend it? I can't now. But it's the truth. I woke up too suddenly. Allan—Allan—." It sounded as if he were trying to recall some forgotten personality. "Oh, Allan!"

The last was more like a cry. He fell into the chair by which he had stood. And now the woman erected herself, coming forward to stand before him, her head bowed, her hands convulsively interlocked.

"Do you see it all, Bernal? Is it plain now? Oh, how it tortured me—that last Gratcher—the one we make in our own image and yet make to be perfect. It never hurt me before, but now I know why. It couldn't hurt me so long as I looked it straight in the eye—but just now my eyes had to fall before it, and all in a second it was tearing me to pieces. That's the only defense against this last Gratcher, Bernal, to look it in the eyes unafraid. And oh, it hurts so—and it's all my own miserable fault!"

"No, it's your goodness, Nance." He spoke very quietly now. "Only the good have a Gratcher that can't be laughed away. My own was late in coming. Your Gratcher has saved us."

He stood up and took her unresisting hands in both his own. They rested there in peace, yielding themselves like tired children to caring arms.

"Now I shall be healed," she said.

"It will take me longer, Nance. My hurt is more stubborn, more complicated. I can't help it. Something in me resists. I see now that I know too much—too much of you, too much of—"

She saw that he must have suffered some illumination upon Allan. There was a look of bitter comprehension in his face as he broke off. She turned away from it.

When, an hour later, Allan came in, he found them chatting easily of the few people of St. Antipas that Bernal had met. At the moment, they were discussing Mrs. Wyeth, whose face, Bernal declared, was of a rare perfection. Nance turned to her husband.

"You must thank Bernal," she said, "for entertaining your guests this afternoon."

"He wouldn't if he knew what I said—or how it must have bored them. One thing, Nance, they won't meet here again until you swear I've gone!"

"Bernal's heart is right, even if his theology doesn't always please me," said his brother graciously, examining some cards that lay on the table. "I see Mrs. Wyeth has called," he continued to Nancy, looking up from these.

"Yes. She wanted me to see her sister, poor Mrs. Eversley, who is ill at her house. I promised to look in to-morrow."

"I've just been telling Nance how beautiful I think Mrs. Wyeth is," said Bernal. "She's rare, with that face of the low-browed Greek. It's one of the memories I shall take back to my Eve-less Eden."

"She is beautiful," said Nancy. "Of course her nose is the least bit thin and long, but it rather adds zest to her face. Now I must dress for dinner."

When Nancy had gone, Bernal, who had been speaking with a marked lightness of tone, turned to Allan with an equally marked seriousness.

"Old chap, you know about that money of mine—of Grandfather's?"

Allan instantly became attentive.

"Of course, there's no hurry about that—you must take time to think it over," he answered.

"But there is hurry! I shouldn't have waited so long to make up my mind.

"Then you have made up your mind?" questioned his brother, with guarded eagerness.

"Definitely. It's all yours, Allan. It will help you in what you want to do. And not having it will help me to do what I want to do—make it simpler, easier. Take it—and for God's sake be good to Nancy."

"I can't tell you how you please me, Bernal. Not that I'm avid for money, but it truly seems more in accord with what must have been grandfather's real wish. And Nancy—of course I shall be good to her—though at times she seems unable to please me."

There was a sanctified displeasure in his tone, as he spoke of Nancy. It caused Bernal to turn upon him a keen, speculative eye, but only for a moment. And his next words had to do with matters tangible. "To-morrow I'll do some of the business that can be done here. Then I'll go up to Edom and finish the transfers that have to be made there." After a brief hesitation, he added: "Try to please her a bit, Allan. That's all."



CHAPTER XVI

IN WHICH THE MIRROR IS HELD UP TO HUMAN NATURE

When, the next day, Nancy went to pay her promised visit to Mrs. Eversley, the rectory was steeped in the deep household peace of mid-afternoon. Both Allan and Bernal had gone out soon after luncheon, while Aunt Bell had withdrawn into the silence, there to meditate the first letters of the alphabet of the inexpressible, to hover about the pleasant line that divides the normal from the subliminal.

Though bruised and torn, Nancy was still grimly upright in the eye of duty, still a worthy follower of orthodox ways. Buried in her own eventful thoughts in that mind-world where love is born and dies, where beliefs rise and perish but no sound ever disturbs the stillness, she made her way along the shaded side of the street toward the Wyeth residence. Not until she had passed several doors beyond the house did she recall her errand, remember that her walk led to a goal, that she herself had matters in hand other than thinking, thinking, thinking.

Retracing her steps, she rang the bell and asked for Mrs. Eversley. Before the servant could reply, Mrs. Wyeth rustled prettily down the hall from the library at the back. She wore a gown of primrose yellow. An unwonted animation lighted the cold perfection of her face, like fire seen through ice.

"So glad to see you!" she said with graceful effusion—"And the Doctor? And that queer, fascinating, puzzling brother of yours, how are they? So glad! Yes, poor sister keeps to her room and you really mustn't linger with me an instant. I'm not even going to ask you to sit down. Go right up. Her door's at the end of the hall, you know. You'll comfort the poor thing beautifully, you dear!"

She paused for breath, a vivid smile taking the place of words. Mrs. Linford, rendered oddly, almost obstinately reserved by this excessive cordiality, was conscious of something unnatural in that smile—a too great intensity, like the greenness of artificial palms.

"Thank you so much for coming, you angel," she went on playfully, "for doubtless I shall not be visible when you go. You see Donald's off in the back of the house re-arranging whole shelves of wretched, dusty books and he fancies that he must have my suggestions."

"The door at the end of the hall!" she trilled in sweet but unmistakable dismissal, one arm pointing gracefully aloft from its enveloping foam of draperies, that same too-intense smile upon the Greek face that even Nancy, in moments of humane expansion, had admitted to be all but faultless. And the latter, wondering not a little at the stiff disposition to have her quickly away, which she had somehow divined through all the gushing cordiality of Mrs. Wyeth's manner, went on upstairs. As she rapped at Mrs. Eversley's door, the bell of the street door sounded in her ears.

Somewhat less than an hour after, she came softly out again, opening and closing the door noiselessly. So effectually had she soothed the invalid, that the latter had fallen into a much-needed sleep, and Nancy, eager to escape to that mind-world where the happenings are so momentous and the silence is so tense, had crept like a mouse from the room.

At the top of the stairs she paused to gather up her skirts. Then her ears seemed to catch the sound of voices on the floor below and she remained motionless for a second, listening. She had no desire to encounter for the second time the torrent of Mrs. Wyeth's manner, no wish to meet unnecessarily one so disagreeably gifted in the art of arousing in her an aversion of which she was half ashamed.

No further sound greeted her straining ears, and, deciding that the way was clear, she descended the thickly carpeted stairs. Near the bottom, opposite the open doors of the front drawing-room, she paused to look into the big mirror on the opposite wall. As she turned her head for a final touch to the back of her veil, her eyes became alive to something in that corner of the room now revealed to her by the mirror—something that held her frozen with embarrassment.

Though the room lay in the dusk of drawn curtains, the gown of Mrs. Wyeth showed unmistakably—Mrs. Wyeth abandoned to the close, still embrace of an unrecognized man.

Distressed at the awkwardness of her position, Nancy hesitated, not knowing whether to retreat or go forward. She had decided to go on, observing nothing—and of course she had observed nothing save an agreeable incident in the oft impugned domesticity of Mr. and Mrs. Wyeth—when a further revelation arrested her.

Even as she put her foot to the next step, the face of Mrs. Wyeth was lifted and Mrs. Wyeth's big eyes fastened upon hers through the impartial mirror. But their expression was not that of the placid matron observed in a passage of conjugal tenderness. Rather, it was one of acute dismay—almost fear. Poor Mrs. Weyth, who had just said, "Doubtless I shall not be visible when you go!"

Even as she caught this look, Nancy started down the remaining steps, her cheeks hot from her own wretched awkwardness. She wanted to hurry—to run; she might still escape without having reason to suspect that the obscured person was other than he should be in the opinion of an exacting world. Then, as her hand was at the door, while the silken rustling of that hurried disentanglement was in her ears, the voice of Wyeth sounded remotely from the rear of the house. It seemed to come from far back in the library, removed from them by the length of the double drawing-rooms—a comfortable, smooth, high-pitched voice—lazy, drawling—

"Oh, Linford!"

Linford! The name seemed to sink into the stillness of the great house, leaving no ripple behind. Before an answer to the call could come, she had opened the great door and pulled it sharply to behind her.

Outside, she lingered a moment as if in serenely absent contemplation of the street, with the air of one who sought to recall her next engagement. Then, gathering up her skirts, she went leisurely down the steps and passed unhurriedly from the view of those dismayed eyes that she felt upon her from the Wyeth window.

On the avenue she turned north and was presently alone in a shaded aisle of the park—that park whose very trees and shrubs seem to have taken on a hard, knowing look from having been so long made the recipients of cynical confidences. They seemed to understand perfectly what had happened, to echo Wyeth's high-pitched, friendly drawl, with an added touch of mockery that was all their own—"Oh—Linford!"



CHAPTER XVII

FOR THE SAKE OF NANCY

It was toward six o'clock when she ascended the steps of the rectory. Bernal, coming from the opposite direction, met her at the door. Back of his glance, as they came together, was an intimation of hidden things, and at sight of him she was smitten by an electric flash of wonder. The voice of Wyeth, that friendly, untroubled voice, she now remembered had called to no specific Linford. In the paralysis of embarrassment that had seized her in that darkened hallway, she had failed to recall that there were at least two Linfords in existence. In an instant her inner world, wrought into something like order in the past two hours, was again chaos.

"Why, Nance—you look like night, when there are no stars—what is it?" He scanned her with an assumption of jesting earnestness, palpably meant to conceal some deeper emotion. She put a detaining hand on his arm as he was about to turn the key in the lock.

"Bernal, I haven't time to be indirect, or beat about, or anything—so forgive the abruptness—were you at Mrs. Wyeth's this afternoon?"

His ear caught the unusual note in her voice, and he was at once concerned with this rather than with her question.

"Why, what is it, Nance—what if I was? Are you seeing another Gratcher?"

"Bernal, quick, now—please! Don't worry me needlessly! Were you at Mrs. Wyeth's to-day?"

Her eyes searched his face. She saw that he was still either puzzled or confused, but this time he answered plainly,

"No—I haven't seen that most sightly cold lady to-day—more's the pity!"

She breathed one quick little sigh—it seemed to him strangely like a sigh of relief.

"I knew you couldn't have been." She laughed a little laugh of secrets. "I was only wondering foolish wonders—you know how Gratchers must be humoured right up to the very moment you puff them away with the deadly laugh."

Together they went in. Bernal stopped to talk with Aunt Bell, who was passing through the hall as they entered; while Nancy, with the manner of one not to be deflected from some set purpose, made straight for Allan's study.

In answer to her ominously crisp little knock, she heard his "Come!" and opened the door.

He sat facing her at his desk, swinging idly from side to side in the revolving chair, through the small space the desk permitted. Upon the blotter before him she saw that he had been drawing interminable squares, oblongs, triangles and circles, joining them to one another in aimless, wandering sequence—his sign of a perturbed mind.

He glanced up with a look of waiting defiance which she knew but masked all his familiar artillery.

Instantly she determined to give him no opportunity to use this. She would end matters with a rush. He was awaiting her attack. She would make none.

"I think there is nothing to say," she began quickly. "I could utter certain words, but they would mean one thing to me and other things to you—there is no real communication possible between us. Only remember that this—to-day—matters little—I had already resolved that sooner or later I must go. This only makes it necessary to go at once."

She turned to the door which she had held ajar. At her words he sat forward in his chair, the yellow stars blazing in his eyes. But the opening was not the one he had counted upon, and before he could alter his speech to fit it, or could do more than raise a hand to detain her, she had gone.

He sat back in his chair, calculating how to meet this mood. Then the door resounded under a double knock and Bernal came in.

"Well, old boy, I'll be off to-night. The lawyer is done with me here and now I'll go to Edom and finish what's to be done there. Then in a few days I'll be out of this machine and back to the ranche. You know I've decided that my message to the world would best take the substantial form of beef—a message which no one will esteem unpractical."

He paused, noting the other's general droop of gloom.

"But what's the trouble, old chap? You look done up!"

"Bernal—it's all because I am too good-hearted, too unsuspecting. Being slow to think evil of others, I foolishly assume that others will be equally charitable. And you don't know what women are—you don't know how the sentimental ones impose upon a man in my office. I give you my word of honour as a man—my word of honour, mind you!—there never has been a thing between us but the purest, the most elevated—the loftiest, most ideal—"

"Hold on, old chap—I shall have to take the car ahead, you know, if you won't let me on this one...."

"—as pure a woman as God ever made, while as for myself, I think my integrity of purpose and honesty of character, my sense of loyalty should be sufficiently known—"

"Say, old boy—" Bernal's face had lighted with a sudden flash of insight—"is it—I don't wish to be indiscreet—but is it anything about Mrs. Wyeth?"

"Then you do know?"

"Nothing, except that Nance met me at the door just now and puzzled me a bit by her very curious manner of asking if I had been at the Wyeth's this afternoon."

"What?" The other turned upon him, his eyes again blazing with the yellow points, his whole figure alert. "She asked you that—Really?"

"To be sure!"

"And you said—"

"'No'—of course—and she mumbled something about having been foolish to think I could have been. You know, old man, Nance was troubled. I could see that."

His brother was now pacing the floor, his head bent from the beautifully squared shoulders, his face the face of a mind working busily.

"An idiot I was—she didn't know me—I had only to—"

Bernal interrupted.

"Are you talking to yourself, or to me?"

The rector of St. Antipas turned at one end of his walk.

"To both of us, brother. I tell you there has been nothing between us—never anything except the most flawless idealism. I admit that at the moment Nancy observed us the circumstances were unluckily such that an excitable, morbidly suspicious woman might have misconstrued them. I will even admit that a woman of judicial mind and of unhurried judgments might not unreasonably have been puzzled, but I would tear my heart open to the world this minute—'Oh, be thou as chaste as ice, as pure as snow, thou shalt not escape calumny!'"

"If I follow you, old chap, Nancy observed some scene this afternoon in which it occurred to her that I might have been an actor." There was quick pain, a sinking in his heart.