 CHAPTER XI. For some weeks the Reverend Theron Ware saw nothing of either the priest or the doctor, or the interesting Miss Madden. There were indeed more urgent matters to think about. Theron had come, and every succeeding day brought closer to hand the ordeal of his first quarterly conference in Octavius. The waters grew distinctly rougher as his pastoral bark neared this difficult passage. He would have approached the great event with an easier mind if he could have made out just how he stood with his congregation. Unfortunately nothing in his previous experiences helped him in the least to measure or guess at the feeling of these curious Octavians. Their methodisms seemed to be sound enough and to stick quite to the letter of the discipline, so long as it was expressed in Formulae. It was its spirit which he felt to be complicated by all sorts of conditions wholly novel to him. The existence of a line of streetcars in the town, for example, would not impress the casual thinker as likely to prove a rock in the path of peaceful religion. Theron, in his simplicity, had even thought, when he first saw these bob-tailed cars bumping along the rails in the middle of the main street, that they must be a great convenience to people living in the outskirts who wish to get into church of a Sunday morning. He was imprudent enough to mention this in conversation with one of his new parishioners. Then he learned, to his considerable chagrin, that when this line was built some years before, a bitter war of words had been fought upon the question of its being worked on the Sabbath day. The then occupant of the Methodist pulpit had so distinguished himself above the rest by the solemnity and fervor of his protests against this insolent desecration of God's day, that the Methodists of Octavius still felt themselves bound to hold this horse-car line its management and everything connected with it in unbending aversion. At least once a year they were accustomed to expect a sermon denouncing it and all its impious Sunday patrons. Theron made a mental resolve that this year they would be disappointed. Another burning problem which he had not been called upon before to confront, he found now entangled with the mysterious line which divided a circus from a menagerie. Those itinerant tent-shows had never come his way here to fore, and he knew nothing of that fine balancing proportion between ladies in tights on horseback and cages full of deeply educational animals which, even as the impartial reign, was designed to embrace alike the just and the unjust. There had arisen inside the Methodist Society of Octavius some painful episodes connected with members who took their children just to see the animals and were convicted of having also watched the rose queen of the arena in her unequaled flying leap through eight hoops with an ardent and unashamed eye. One of these cases still remained on the sensorial docket of the church, and Theron understood that he was expected to name a committee of five to examine and try it. This he neglected to do. He was no longer at all certain that the congregation as a whole liked his sermons. The truth was, no doubt, that he had learned enough to cease regarding the congregation as a whole. He could still rely upon carrying along with him, in his discourses from the pulpit, a large majority of interested and approving faces, but here unhappily was a case where the majority did not rule. The minority, relatively small in numbers, was prodigious and virile force. More than twenty years had not elapsed since that minor schism in the Methodist Episcopal Church, the result of which was the independent body known as free Methodists, had relieved the parent flock of its principal disturbing element. The rupture came fittingly at a time when all the isms of the argumentative fifties were hurled violently together into the melting pot of civil war. The great Methodist Church, south, had broken bodily off on the question of state rights. The smaller and domestic fraction of free Methodism separated itself upon an issue which may be most readily described as one of civilization. The seceders resented growth in material prosperity. They repudiated the introduction of written sermons and organ music. They deplored the increasing laxity and meddlesome piety, the introduction of polite manners in the pulpit and classroom, and the development of even a rudimentary desire among the younger people of the Church to be like others outside in dress and speech and deportment. They did battle, as long as they could, inside the fold, to restore it to the severely straight and narrow path of primitive Methodism. When the adverse odds became too strong for them, they quitted the Church and set up a Bethel for themselves. Octavius chanced to be one of the places where they were able to hold their own within the Church organization. The Methodism of the town had gone along without any local secession. It still held in full fellowship the radicals who elsewhere had followed their unbridled bent into the strongest emotional vagaries, where excited brethren worked themselves up into epileptic fits and women whirled themselves about in weird religious ecstasies like dervishes of the Orient, till they fell headlong in a state of trance. Octavian Methodism was spared extravagances of this sort, it is true, but it paid a price for the immunity. The people whom an open split would have taken away remained to leaven and dominate the whole lump. This small advanced section, with its men the type all the more aggressive from its narrowness, and the women who went about solemnly in plain grey garments with tight fitting unadorned, mouse-colored sun-bonnets, had not been able wholly to enforce its views upon the social life of the Church members, but of its controlling influence upon their official and public actions there could be no doubt. The situation had begun to unfold itself to Theron from the outset. He had recognized the episodes of the forbidden Sunday milk and of the flowers in poor Alice's bonnet as typical of much more that was to come. No week followed without bringing some new fulfillment of this foreboding. Now at the end of two months he knew well enough that the hitherto dominant minority was hostile to him and his ministry and would do whatever it could against him. Though Theron at once decided to show fight and did not at all waver in that resolve his courage was in the main of a despondent sort. Sometimes it would flutter up to the point of confidence, or at least hopefulness, when he met with substantial men of the Church who obviously liked him and whom he found himself mentally ranging on his side in the struggle which was to come. But more often it was blankly apparent to him that, the moment flags were flying and drums on the roll, these amiable fair weather friends would probably take to their heels. Still, such as they were, his sole hope lay in their support. He must make the best of them. He set himself doggedly to the task of gathering together all those who were not his enemies into what, when the proper time came, should be known as the pastor's party. There was plenty of apostolic warrant for this. If there had not been, Theron felt that the mere elementary demands of self-defense would have justified his use of strategy. The institution of pastoral calling, particularly that inquisitorial form of it laid down in the discipline, had never attracted Theron. He and Dallas had gone about among their previous flocks in quite a haphazard fashion, without thought of a system much less of deliberate purpose. Theron made lists now and devoted thought and examination to the personal taste and characteristics of the people to be cultivated. There were some, for example, who would expect him to talk pretty much as the discipline ordained, that is, to ask if they had family prayer, to inquire after their souls, and generally to minister grace to his hearers. And these, in turn, subdivided themselves into classes, ranging from those who would wish nothing else to those who needed only a mild spiritual flavor. There were others whom he would please much better by not talking shop at all. Although he could ill afford it, he subscribed now for a daily paper that he might have a perpetually renewed source of good conversational topics for these more worldly calls. He also bought several pounds of candy, pleasing in color, but warranted to be entirely harmless, and he made a large mysterious mark on the inside of his new silk hat to remind him not to go out calling without some of this in his pocket for the children. He felt was not helping him in this matter as effectively as he could have wished. Her attitude toward the church in Octavius might be best described by the word sulky. Great allowance was to be made, he realized, for her humiliation over the flowers in her bonnet. That might justify her, fairly enough, in being kept away from meeting now and again by headaches or undefined migrums. But it ought not to prevent her from going about and making friends among the kindlier parishioners who would welcome such a thing, and whom he from time to time indicated to her. She did go to some extent, it is true, but she produced in doing so an effect of performing a duty. He did not find traces anywhere of her having created a brilliant social impression. When they went out together he was peculiarly conscious of having to do the work unaided. This was not at all like the Alice of former years, of other charges, why she had been, beyond comparison, the most popular young woman in Tyre, what possessed her to mope like this in Octavius? Theron looked at her attentively nowadays, when she was unaware of his gaze, to try if her face offered any answer to the riddle. It could not be suggested that she was ill, never in her life had she been looking so well. She had thrown herself all at once, and with what was to him an unaccountable energy, into the creation and management of a flower garden. She was out the better part of every day, rain or shine, digging, transplanting, pruning, pottering generally about among her plants and shrubs. This work in the open air had given her an aspect of physical well-being, which it was impossible to be mistaken about. Her husband was glad, of course, that she had found some occupation, which at once pleased her, and so obviously conduced to health. This was so much a matter, of course, in fact, that he said to himself over and over again that he was glad, only, sometimes the thought would force itself upon his attention, that if she did not spend so much of her time in her own garden, she would have more time to devote to winning friends for them in the garden of the Lord, friends whom they were going to need badly. The young minister, in taking anxious stock of the chances for and against him, turned over often in his mind the fact that he had already won rank as a pulpit orator. His sermons had attracted almost universal attention entire, and his achievement before the conference at Tecumseh, if it did fail to receive practical reward, had admittedly distanced all the other preaching there. It was a part of the evil luck pursuing him, that here in this perversely enigmatic Octavius, his special gift seemed to be of no use whatever. There were times indeed when he was tempted to think that bad preaching was what Octavius wanted. Somewhere he had heard of a Presbyterian minister, in charge of a big city church, who managed to keep well in with a watchfully orthodox congregation, and at the same time established himself in the affections of the community at large by simply preaching two kinds of sermons. In the morning, when almost all who attended were his own communicatents, he gave them very cautious and edifying doctrinal discourses, treading loyally in the path of the West Minster Confession. To the evening assemblages, made up for the larger part of outsiders, he addressed broadly liberal sermons, literary in form, and full of respectful allusions to modern science and the philosophy of the day. Thus he filled the church at both services, and put money in its treasury and his own fame before the world. There was of course the obvious danger that the pious elders, who in the forenoon heard infant damnation vigorously proclaimed, would revolt when they heard after supper, that there was some doubt about even adults being damned at all. But either because the same people did not attend both services, or because the minister's perfect regularity in the morning was each week regarded as a retraction of his latest vagaries of an evening, no trouble ever came. Theron had somewhat tentatively tried this on in Octavius, it was no good. His parishioners were of the sort, who would have come to church eight times a day on Sunday instead of two, if occasion offered. The hope that even a portion of them would stop away, and that their places would be taken in the evening by less prejudiced strangers, who wished for intellectual rather than theological food, fell by the wayside. The yearned forest strangers did not come. The familiar faces of the morning service all turned up in their accustomed places every evening. They were faces which confused and disheartened Theron in the daytime. Under the gaslight they seemed even harder and more unsympathetic. He temerously experimented with them for an evening or two, then abandoned the effort. Once there it seemed the beginning of a chance. The richest banker in Octavius, a fat, sensual, hog-faced old bachelor, surprised everybody one evening by entering the church and taking a seat. Theron happened to know who he was, even if he had not known, the suppressed excitement within the congregation, the way the sisters turned round to look, the way the more important brethren put their heads together and exchanged furtive whispers would have warned him that big game was in view. He recalled afterward with something like self-disgust the eager, almost tremulous pains he himself took to please this banker. There was a part of the sermon, as it had been written out, which might easily give offense to a single man of wealth and free notions of life. With the alertness of a mental gymnast Theron ran ahead, excised this portion, and had ready when the gap was reached, some pretty good general remarks, all the more effective and eloquent he felt for having been extemporized. People said it was a good sermon, and after the benediction and dispersion some of the officials and principal pew-holders remained to talk over the likelihood of a capture having been affected. Theron did not get away without having this mentioned to him, and he was conscious of sharing deeply the hope of the brethren, with the added reflection that it would be a personal triumph for himself into the bargain. He was ashamed of this feeling a little later, and of his trick with the sermon, but this chastening product of introspection was all the fruit which the incident bore. The banker never came again. Theron returned one afternoon, a little earlier than usual, from a group of pastoral calls. Alice, who was plucking weeds in a border at the shady side of the house, heard his step and rose from her labours. He was walking slowly and seemed weary. He took off his high hat as he saw her and wiped his brow. The broiling June sun was still high overhead. Doubtless it was its insufferable heat which was accountable for the worn lines in his face, and the spiritless air which the wife's eye detected. She went to the gate and kissed him as he entered. I believe if I were you, she said, I'd carry an umbrella such scorching days as these. Nobody'd think anything of it. I don't see why a minister shouldn't carry one as much as a woman carries a parasol. Then gave her a rueful, meditative sort of smile. I suppose people really do think of us as a kind of hybrid female, he remarked. Then holding his hat in his hand he drew a long breath of relief at finding himself in the shade and looked about him. Why, you've got more posies here on this side of the house alone than mother had in her whole yard, he said, after a little. Let's see, I know that one, that's Columbine, isn't it? And that's London Pride, and that's Ragged Robin, I don't know any of the others. Alice recited various unfamiliar names, as she pointed out the several plants which bore them, and he listened with a kindly semblance of interest. They strolled thus to the rear of the house, where thick clumps of fragrant pinks lined both sides of the path. He picked some of these for him, and gave him more names with which to label the considerable number of other plants he saw about him. I had no idea we were so well provided as all that. He commented at last, Those Van Cisors must have been tremendous hands for flowers. You are lucky in following such people. Van Cisors echoed Alice with contempt. All they left was old tomato cans and clam shells. Why I've put in every blessed one of these myself, except these peonies here, and one briar on the side wall. Good for you, exclaimed Theron, approvingly. Then it occurred to him to ask, But where did you get them all, around among our friends? Some few. Responded Alice with a note of hesitation in her voice. Sister Balt gave me the verbenas there, and the white pinks were present from Miss Stevens, but most of them Levi Goranj was good enough to send me. From his garden. I didn't know that Goranj had a garden, said Theron. I thought he lived over his law-office, in the brick block there. Well, I don't know it's exactly his, explained Alice, but it's a big garden somewhere outside, where he can have anything he likes. She went on, with a little laugh. I didn't question him too closely. For fear he'd think I was looking a gift-horse in the mouth, or else hinting for more. It was quite his own offer, you know. He picked them all out for me, and brought them here, and let me a book telling me just what to do with each one. And in a few days now I am to have another big batch of plants, delias and zinnias and asters and so on. I'm almost ashamed to take them, but it's such a change to find someone in this Octavius who isn't all self. Yes, Goranj is a good fellow, said Theron. I wish he was a professing member. Then, some new thought struck him. Alice, he exclaimed, I believe I'll go see him this very afternoon. I don't know why it hasn't occurred to me before. He's just the man whose advice I need most. He knows these people here. He can tell me what to do. Aren't you too tired now? Suggested Alice, as Theron put on his hat. No, the sooner the better. He replied, moving now toward the gate. Well, she began, if I were you, I wouldn't say too much about—that is, I—but never mind. What is it? asked her husband. Nothing whatever, replied Alice positively. It was only some nonsense of mine. And Theron, placidly accepting the feminine whim, went off down the street again. CHAPTER XII. The reverend Mr. Ware found Levi Gorinj's law-office readily enough, but its owner was not in. He probably would be back again, though, in a quarter of an hour or so, the boy said, and the minister at once decided to wait. Theron was interested in finding that this office boy was no other than Harvey, the lad who brought milk to the parsonage every morning. He remembered now that he had heard good things about this urchin, as to the hard work he did to help his mother, the widow Semple, in her struggle to keep a roof over her head, and also bad things in that he did not come regularly either to church or Sunday school. The clergyman recalled, too, that Harvey had impressed him as a character. Well, sonny, are you going to be a lawyer? he asked, as he seated himself by the window and looked around him, first at the dusty litter of old papers, pamphlets, and tape-bound documents in bundles, which crowded the stuffy chamber, and then at the boy himself. Harvey was busy at a big box, a rough pine dry-goods box which bore the flaring label of an express company, and also of a well-known seed-firm in a western city, and which the boy had apparently just opened. He was lifting from it and placing on the table after he had shaken off the saw-dust and moss in which they were packed, small parcels of what looked in the fading light to be half-dried plants. Well, I don't know, I rather guess not, he made answer, as he pursued his task. So far as I can make out, this wouldn't be the place to start in at, if I was going to be a lawyer. A boy can learn here first-rate how to load cartridges and clean a gun, and breed trout flies onto leaders, but I don't see much law laying around loose. Anyway, he went on, I couldn't afford to read law, and not be getting any wages, I have to earn money, you know. Theron felt that he liked the boy. Yes, he said, with a kindly tone, I have heard that you were a good industrious youngster. I daresay Mr. Gorenge will see to it that you get a chance to read law, and get wages too. Oh, I can read all there is here and welcome, the boy explained, stepping toward the window to decipher the label on a bundle of roots in his hand. But that's no good unless there's regular practice coming into the office all the while. That's how you learn to be a lawyer. The Gorenge don't have what I call a practice at all. He just sees men in the other room there with the door shut, and whatever there is to do, he does it all himself. The minister remembered a stray hint somewhere that Mr. Gorenge was a moneylender, what was colloquially called a note-shaver. To his rustic sense, there was something not quite nice about that occupation. It would be indecorous, he felt, to encourage further talk about it from the boy. What are you doing there? He inquired, to change the subject. Sorting out some plants, replied Harvey. I don't know what's got into Gorenge lately. This is the third big box he's had since I've been here, that is, in six weeks, besides two baskets full of rosebushes. I don't know what he does with them. He carries them off himself somewhere. I've had kind of a notion that he's figuring on getting married. I can't think of anything else that would make a man spend money like water, just for flowers and bushes. They do get foolish, you know, when they've got marriage on the brain. Theron found himself only imperfectly following the theories of the young philosopher. It was his fact that monopolized the young minister's attention. But as I understand it, he remarked hesitatingly, Brother Gorenge, or rather Mr. Gorenge, gets all the plants he wants, everything he likes, from a big garden somewhere outside. I don't know that it is exactly his, but I remember hearing something to that effect. The boy slapped the last sawdust off his hands, and as he came to the window shook his head. These don't come from no garden outside, he declared. They come from the dealers, and he pays solid cash for them. The invoice for this lot alone was thirty-one dollars and sixty cents. There it is on the table, you can see it yourself. Mr. Ware did not offer to look. Very likely these are for the garden I was speaking of, he said. Of course you can't go on taking plants out of a garden indefinitely without putting others in. I don't know anything about any garden he takes plants out of, answered Harvey, and looked meditatively for a minute or two out upon the street below. Then he turned to the minister. Her wife's doing a good deal of gardening this spring, I notice. He said casually. You'd hardly think it was the same place, she's fixed it up so. If she wants any extra hoeing done, I can always get off Saturday afternoons. I will remember, said Theron. He also looked out of the window, and nothing more was said until, a few moments later, Mr. Gorinch himself came in. The lawyer seemed both surprised and pleased at discovering the identity of his visitor, with whom he shook hands in an almost excess of cordiality. He spread a large newspaper over the pile of seedling plants on the table, pushed back the packing box under the table with his foot, and said almost peremptorily to the boy, you can go now. Then he turned again to Theron. Well, Mr. Ware, I'm glad to see you. He repeated, and drew up a chair by the window. Things are going all right with you, I hope? Theron noted again the waving black hair, the dark skin, and the carefully trimmed mustache and chin tuft, which gave the lawyer's face a combined effect of romance and smartness. No, it was the eyes, cool, shrewd, dark gray eyes which suggested this latter quality. The recollection of having seen one of them wink in deliberate hostility of sarcasm, when those other trustees had their backs turned, came mercifully at the moment to recall the young minister to his errand. I thought I would drop in and have a chat with you, he said, getting better under way, as he went on. Quarterly conference is only a fortnight off, and I am a good deal at sea about what is going to happen. I am not a church member, you know, interposed gorge. That shuts me out of the quarterly conference. Alas, yes, said Theron. I wish it didn't. I'm afraid I'm not going to have any friends to spare there. What are you afraid of? asked the logger, seeming now to be holy at his ease again. They can't eat you. No, but they can make me lean for that, responded Theron, with a pensive smile. I was going to ask, you know, for an increase of salary or an extra allowance. I don't see how I can go on as it is. The sum fixed by the last quarterly conference of the old year, and which I am getting now, is one hundred dollars less than my predecessor had. That isn't fair, and it isn't right. But so far from it's looking as if I could get an increase, the prospect seems more rather that they will make me pay for the gas and that sidewalk. I never recovered more than about half of my moving expenses, as you know, and frankly, I don't know which way to turn. It keeps me miserable all the while. That's where you're wrong, said Mr. Gorange. If you let things like that worry you, you'll keep a sore skin all your life. You take my advice, and just go ahead your own gate, and let others do the worrying. They are pretty close-fisted here, for a fact. But you can manage to rub along somehow. If you should get into any real difficulties, why, I guess. The lawyer paused to smile in a hesitating, significant way. I guess some road out can be found all right. The main thing is don't fret, and don't allow your wife to fret either. He stopped abruptly. Therein nodded in recognition of his amiable tone, and then found the nod lengthening itself out into almost a bow as the thought spread through his mind that this had been nothing more nor less than a promise to help him with money if worst came to worst. He looked at Levi Gorange and said to himself that the intuition of women was wonderful. Alice had picked him out as a friend of theirs merely by seeing him past the house. Yes, he said, I am specially anxious to keep my wife from worrying. She was surrounded in her girlhood by a good deal of what relatively we should call luxury, and that makes it all the harder for her to be the poor minister's wife. I had quite decided to get a hired girl, come what might, but she thinks she'd rather get on without one. Her health is better, I must admit, than it was when we came here. She works out in her garden a good deal, and that seems to agree with her. Octavius is a healthy place, that's generally admitted, replied the lawyer with indifference. He seemed not to be interested in Mrs. Ware's health, but looked intently out through the window at the building's opposite, and drummed with his fingers on the arms of his chair. Therein made haste to revert to his errand. Of course you're not being in the quarterly conference, he said, renders certain things impossible, but I didn't know but you might have some knowledge of how things are going, what plans the officials of the church had. They seem to have agreed to tell me nothing. Well, I have heard this much, responded Goringe. They're figuring on getting the soulsbees here to raise the debt, and kind of shake things up generally. I think that's about as good as settled, hadn't you heard of it? Not a breath, exclaimed Theron mournfully. Well, he added upon reflection. I'm sorry, downright sorry. The debt-raiser seems to me about the lowest down thing we produce. I've heard of those soulsbees. I saw him indeed once at a conference, and I believe she is the head of the firm. Yes, she wears the breeches, I understand. Said Goringe, sententiously. I had hoped, the young minister began, with a rueful sigh. In fact, I felt quite confident at the outset that I could pay off this debt and put the church generally on a new footing by giving extra attention to my pulpit work. It is hardly for me to say it, but in other places where I have been, my preaching has been rather a feature in the town itself. I have always been accustomed to attract to our service as the good many non-members, and that, as you know, helps tremendously from a money-point of view. But somehow this has failed here. I doubt if the average congregations are a wit larger now than they were when I came in April. I know the collections are not. No, commented the lawyer slowly. You'll never do anything in that line, in Octavius. You might, of course, if you were to stay here and work hard at it for five or six years. Heaven forbid, groaned Mr. Ware. Quite so, put in the other. The point is that the Methodists here are a little set by themselves. I don't know that they like one another specially, but I do know that they are not what you might call popular with people outside. Now, a new preacher at the Presbyterian Church, or even the Baptist, he might have a chance to create talk and make a stir, but Methodists know. People who don't belong won't come near the Methodist Church here, so long as there's any other place with a roof on it to go to. Give a dog a bad name, you know. Well, the Methodists here have got a bad name. And if you could preach like Henry Ward Beecher himself, you wouldn't change it, or get folks to come and hear you. I see what you mean, therein responded. I'm not particularly surprised myself that Octavius doesn't love us, or look to us for intellectual stimulation. I myself leave that pulpit more often than otherwise feeling like a wet rag, utterly limp and discouraged. But if you don't mind my speaking of it, you don't belong, and yet you come. It was evident that the lawyer did not mind. He spoke freely in reply. Oh yes, I've got into the habit of it. I began going when I first came here, and so it grew to be natural for me to go. But then, of course, being the only lawyer you have, a considerable amount of my business is mixed up in one way or another with your membership. You see, those are really the things which settle a man in a rut and keep him there. I suppose your people were Methodists, said Theron, to fill in the pause. And that is how you originally started with us. Levi Gorin shook his head. He leaned back, half closed his eyes, put his fingertips together, and almost smiled as if something in retrospect pleased and moved him. No, he said. I went to the church first to see a girl who used to go there. It was long before your time. All her family moved away years ago. You wouldn't know any of them. I was younger then, and I didn't know as much as I do now. I worshipped the very ground that girl walked on, and like a fool I never gave her so much as a hint of it. Going back now, I can see that I might have had her if I'd asked her. But I went instead and sat around and looked at her at church and Sunday school and prayer meetings Thursday nights and class meetings after the sermon. She was devoted to religion and church work, and, thinking it would please her, I joined the church on probation. Men can fool themselves easier than they can other people. I actually believed at the time that I had experienced religion. I felt myself full of all sorts of awakenings of the soul, and so forth. But it was really that girl. You see, I'm telling you the thing just as it was. I was very happy. I think it was the happiest time of my life. I remember there was a love feast while I was on probation, and I sat down in front, right beside her, and we ate the little square hunks of bread and drank the water together, and I held one corner of her hymn book while we stood up and sang. That was the nearest I ever got to her or to full membership in the church. That very next week, I think it was, we learned that she had got engaged to the minister's son, a young man who had just become a minister himself. They got married and went away, and I, somehow I never took up my membership when the six months probation was over. That's how it was. It is very interesting, remarked Theron softly after a little silence, and very full of human nature. Well, now you see, said the lawyer, what I mean when I say there hasn't been another minister here since, that I should have felt like telling this story to. They wouldn't have understood it at all. They would have thought it was blasphemy for me to say straight out that what I took for experiencing a religion was really a girl, but you were different. I felt that at once the first time I saw you, in a pulpit or out of it, what I like in a human being is that he should be human. It pleases me beyond measure that you should like me then, return the young minister, with frank gratification shining on his face. The world has made all the sweeter and more lovable by these, these elements of romance. I am not one of those that would wish to see them banished or frowned upon. I don't mind admitting to you that there is a good deal in Methodism. I mean the strict practice of its letter, which you find here in Octavius, that is personally distasteful to me. I read the other day of an English bishop who said boldly, publicly, that no modern nation could practice the principles laid down in the Sermon on the Mount and survive for twenty-four hours. Ha-ha! That's good! laughed the lawyer. I felt it was good too, pursued Theron. I am getting to see a great many things differently here in Octavius. Our Methodist discipline is like the Beatitudes, very helpful and beautiful if treated as spiritual suggestion, but more or less of a stumbling block if insisted upon literally. I declare, he added, sitting back in his chair, I never talked like this to a living soul before in all my life. Your confidences were contagious. The Reverend Mr. Ware rose as he spoke and took up his hat. Must you be going? asked the lawyer, also rising. Well, I'm glad I haven't shocked you. Come in oftener when you are passing, and if you see anything I can help you in, always tell me. The two men shook hands with an emphatic and lingering clasp. I am glad, said Theron, that you didn't stop coming to church just because you lost the girl. Levi Gorinj answered the minister's pleasantry with a smile which curled his mustache upward and expanded in little wrinkles at the ends of his eyes. No, he said justingly, I'm death on collecting debts, and I reckon that the church still owes me a girl, I'll have one yet. So with merriment the echoes of which pleasantly accompanied Theron down the stairway, the two men parted. CHAPTER XIII Though time lagged in passing, with a slowness which seemed born of studied insolence, there did arrive at last a day which had something definitive about it to Theron's disturbed and restless mind. It was a Thursday, and the prayer meeting to be held that evening would be the last before the quarterly conference, now only four days off. For some reason the young minister found himself dwelling upon this fact, and investing it with importance. But yesterday the quarterly conference had seemed a long way ahead. Today brought it alarmingly close to hand. He had not here to fore regarded the weekly assemblage for prayer and song as a thing calling for preparation or for any preliminary thought. Now on this Thursday morning he went to his desk after breakfast, which was a sign that he wanted the room to himself, quite as if he had the task of a weighty sermon before him. He sat at the desk all the forenoon, doing no writing it is true, but remembering every once in a while, when his mind turned aside from the book in his hands, that there was that prayer meeting in the evening. Sometimes he reached the point of vaguely wondering why this strictly common place of prayer should be forcing itself thus upon his attention. Then with a kind of mental shiver at the recollection that this was Thursday, and that the great struggle came on Monday he would go back to his book. There were a half dozen volumes on the open desk before him. He had taken them out from beneath a pile of old Sunday school advocates and church magazines, where they had lain hidden from Alice's view most of the week. If there had been a locked drawer in the house he would have used it instead to hold these books, which had come to him in a neat parcel, but also contained an amiable note from Dr. Ledzmar, recalling a pleasant evening in May, and expressing the hope that the accompanying works would be of some service. Theron had glanced at the backs of the uppermost two and discovered that their author was Raynon. Then he had hastily put the lot in the best place he could think of to escape his wife's observation. He realized now that there had been no need for this secrecy. Of the other four books by Sace, Budge, Smith, and Linnermint, three indeed revealed themselves to be published under religious auspices. As for Raynon, he might have known that the name would be meaningless to Alice. The feeling that he himself was not much wiser in this matter than his wife may have led him to pass over the learned textbooks on Chaldean antiquity, and even the volume of Raynon, which appeared to be devoted to oriental inscriptions, and take up his other book, entitled in translation, Recollections of My Youth. This he rather glanced through at the outset, following with a certain inattention the introductory sketches and essays, which dealt with an unfamiliar, and to his notion, somewhat preposterous Breton racial type. Then little by little it dawned upon him that there was a connected story in all this, and suddenly he came upon it, out in the open, as it were. It was the story of how a deeply devout young man, trained from his earliest boyhood for the sacred office, and desiring passionately nothing but to be worthy of it, came to a point where, at infinite cost of pain to himself, and of anguish to those dearest to him, he had to declare that he could no longer believe at all in revealed religion. Theron Ware read this all with an excited interest which no book had ever stirred in him before. Much of it he read over and over again, to make sure that he penetrated everywhere the husk of French habits of thought, and Catholic methods in which the kernel was wrapped. He broke off midway in this part of the book to go out to the kitchen to dinner, and began the meal in silence. To Alice's questions he replied briefly that he was preparing himself for the evening's prayer meeting. She lifted her brows in such frank surprise at this that he made a further and somewhat rambling explanation about having again taken up the work on his book, the book about Abraham. I thought you said you'd given that up altogether, she remarked. Well, he said, I was discouraged about it for a while. But a man never does anything big without getting discouraged over and over again while he's doing it. I don't say now that I shall write precisely that book. I'm merely reading scientific works about the period, you know. But if not that, I shall write some other book. Else how will you get that piano? He added, with an attempt at a smile. I thought you had given that up, too, she replied ruefully. Then before he could speak she went on. Never mind the piano, that can wait. What I've got on my mind just now isn't piano, it's potatoes. Do you know, I saw some the other day at Razback's, splendid potatoes, these are some of them, and fifteen cents a bushel cheaper than those dried up old things Brother Barnum keeps, and so I bought two bushels, and Sister Barnum met me on the street this morning, and threw it in my face that the discipline commands us to trade with each other. Is there any such command? Yes, said the husband, it's Section 33. Don't you remember, I looked it up entire, we are to evidence our desire by salvation by doing good, especially to them that are of the household of faith, or groaning so to be, by employing them preferably to others, buying one of another, helping each other in business, and so on. Yes, it's all there. Well I told her I didn't believe it was, put in Alice, and I said that even if it was, there ought to be another section about selling potatoes to their minister for more than their worth, potatoes that turn all green when you boil them too. I believe I'll read up that old discipline myself, and see if it hasn't got some things I can talk back with. The very section before that, number 32, enjoined members against uncharitable or unprofitable conversation, particularly speaking evil, of magistrates or ministers. You'd have them there, I think. Theron had begun cheerfully enough, but the careworn preoccupied look now returned to his face. I'm sorry if we've fallen out with the Barnums, he said. His brother-in-law Davis, the Sunday School Superintendent, is a member of the Quarterly Conference, you know, and I've been hoping that he was on my side, I've been taking a good deal of pains to make up to him. He ended with a sigh, the pathos of which impressed Alice. If you think it will do any good, she volunteered. I'll go and call on the Davises this very afternoon. I'm sure to find her at home. She's tied hand and foot with that brood of hers, and you'd better give me some of that candy for them. Theron nodded his approval and thanks, and relapsed into silence. When the meal was over, he brought out the confectionary to his wife, and without a word went back to that remarkable book. When Alice returned toward the close of day to prepare the simple tea which was always laid a half hour earlier on Thursdays and Sundays, she found her husband where she had left him, still busy with those new scientific works. She recounted to him some incidents of her call upon Mrs. Davis as she took off her hat and put on the big kitchen apron. How pleased Mrs. Davis seemed to be, how her affection for her sister-in-law, the grocer's wife, disclosed itself to be not even skin deep. How the children leaped upon the candy as if they had never seen any before, and how, in her belief, Mr. Davis would be heart and soul on Theron's side at the conference. To her surprise, the young minister seemed not at all interested. He hardly looked at her during her narrative, but reclined in the easy chair with his head thrown back and an abstracted gaze wandering aimlessly upon the ceiling. When she avowed her faith in the Sunday school superintendent's loyal partisanship, which she did with a pardonable pride in having helped to make it secure, her husband even closed his eyes and moved his head with a gesture which plainly bespoke indifference. I expected you'd be tickled to death, she remarked, with evident disappointment. I have a bad headache, he explained, after a moment's pause. No wonder, Alice rejoined, sympathetically enough, but with a note of reproof as well. What can you expect, staying cooped up in here all day long pouring over those books? People are all the while remarking that you study too much. I tell them, of course, that you're a great hand for reading, and always were, but I think myself it would be better if you got out more and took more exercise and saw people. You know lots and slathers more than they do, or ever will, if you never opened another book. Theron regarded her with an expression which she had never seen on his face before. You don't realize what you are saying, he said slowly. He sighed, as he added, with an increased gravity. I am the most ignorant man alive. Alice began a little laugh of wifely incredulity, and then let it die away, as she recognized that he was really troubled and sad in his mind. She bent over to kiss him lightly on the brow, and tiptoed her way out into the kitchen. I believe I will let you make my excuses at the prayer meeting this evening. He said, all at once, as the supper came to an end. He had eaten next to nothing during the meal, and had sat in a sort of brown study from which Alice kindly forbore to arouse him. I don't know, I hardly feel equal to it. They won't take it amiss for once, if you explain to them that I am not at all well. Oh, I do hope you're not coming down with anything. Alice had risen, too, and was gazing at him with a solicitude, the tenderness of which, at once comforted, and in some obscure way, jarred on his nerves. Is there anything I can do, or shall I go to the doctor? We've got mustard in the house, and cinnamon. I think there's some sena left, and Jamaica ginger. Theron shook his head wearily at her. Oh, no, no, he expostulated. It isn't anything that needs drugs or doctors, either. It's just mental worry and fatigue, that's all. An evening's quiet rest in the big chair and early to bed. That will fix me up all right. But you'll read, and that will make your head worse, said Alice. No, I won't read any more, he promised her, walking slowly into the sitting room, and settling himself in the big chair, the while she brought a pillow out of the adjoining best bedroom, and adjusted it behind his head. That's nice, I'll just lie quiet here, and perhaps doze a little till you come back. I feel in the mood for the rest, it will do me all sorts of good. He closed his eyes, and Alice, regarding his upturned face anxiously, decided that already it looked more at peace than a while ago. Well, I hope you'll be better when I get back, she said, as she began preparations for the evening's service. These consisted in combing stiffly back the strands of her light brown hair, which, during the day, had exuberantly loosened themselves over her temples into something almost like curls. In fastening down upon this rebellious hair a plain brown-straw bonnet, guiltless of all ornament, save a binding ribbon of dull umber hue. And in putting on a thin, dark-gray shawl, and a pair of equally subdued, lyle-thread gloves, thus attired she made a mischievous little grimace of dislike at her puritanical image in the looking-glass over the mantel, and then turned to announce her departure. Well, I'm off, she said. Theron opened his eyes to take in the figure of his wife dressed for prayer meeting, and then close them again abruptly. It was all right, he murmured, and then he heard the door shut behind her. Although he had been alone all day, there seemed to be quite a unique value and quality in this present solitude. He stretched out his legs on the opposite chair, and looked lazily about him, with the feeling that at last he had secured some leisure, and could think undisturbed to his heart's content. There were nearly two hours of unbroken quiet before him, and the mere fact of his having stepped aside from the routine of his duty to procure it marked it in his thoughts as a special occasion, which ought in the nature of things to yield more than the ordinary harvest of mental profit. Theron's musings were broken in upon from time to time by rumbling outbursts of hymn singing from the church next door. Surely, he said to himself, there could be no other congregation in the conference, or in all methodism, which sang so badly as these Octavians did. The noise, as it came to him now and again, divided itself familiarly into a main strain of hard, high, sharp, and tinny female voices, with three or four concurrent and clashing branch strains of part singing by men who did not know how. How well he already knew these voices. Through two wooden walls he could detect the conceited and pushing note of brother love-joy, who tried always to drown the rest out, and the lifeless, unmeasured weight of shrill clamour which Sister Barnum hurled into every chorus, half closing her eyes and sticking out her chin as she did so. They drawled their hymns to these people, till Theron thought he understood that injunction in the discipline against singing too slowly. It had puzzled him here to four. Now he felt it must have been meant in prophecy for Octavius. It was impossible not to recall in contrast that other church music he had heard a month before and the whole atmosphere of that other pastoral sitting-room from which he had listened to it. The startled and crowded impressions of that strange evening had been lying hidden in his mind all this while, driven into a corner by the pressure of more ordinary, everyday matters. They came forth now and passed across his brain, no longer confusing and distorted but in orderly and intelligible sequence. Their earlier effect had been one of frightened fascination. Now he looked them over calmly as they lifted themselves one by one and found himself not shrinking at all or evading anything, but dwelling upon each in turn as a natural and welcome part of the most important experience of his life. The young minister had arrived all at once at this conclusion. He did not question at all the means by which he had reached it. Nothing was clearer to his mind than the conclusion itself, that his meeting with the priest and the doctor was the turning point in his career. They had lifted him bodily out of the slough of ignorance, of contact with low minds and sordid, narrow things and put him on solid ground. This book he had been reading, this gentle, tender, lovable book, which had as much true piety in it as any devotional book he had ever read, and yet, unlike all devotional books, put its foot firmly upon everything which could not be proved in human reason to be true, must be merely one of a thousand which men like Father Forbes and Dr. Lezmar knew by heart. The very thought that he was on the way now to know them, too, made there in tremble. The prospect wooed him, and he thrilled in response, with the wistful and delicate eagerness of a young lover. Somehow the fact that the priest and the doctor were not religious men, and that this book which had so impressed and stirred him was nothing more than Rennan's recital of how he, too, ceased to be a religious man, did not take a form which Theron could look square in the face. It wore the shape, instead, of a vague premise that there were a great many different kinds of religions. The past and dead races had multiplied these in their time literally into thousands, and that each no doubt had its central support of truth somewhere for the good men who were in it, and that to call one of these divine and condemn all the others was a part fit only for untutored bigots. Rennan had formally repudiated Catholicism, yet could write in his old age with the deepest filial affection for the mother church he had quitted. Father Forbes could talk coolly about the Christ myth without even ceasing to be a priest, and apparently a very active and devoted priest. Evidently there was an intellectual world, a world of culture and grace, of lofty thoughts and the inspiring communion of real knowledge, where creeds were not of importance, and where men asked one another not, is your soul saved, but is your mind well furnished? Theron had the sensation of having been invited to become a citizen of this world. The thought so dazzled him that his impulses were dragging him forward to take the new oath of allegiance before he had had time to reflect upon what it was he was abandoning. The droning of the doxology from the church outside stirred there and suddenly out of this reverie. It had grown quite dark, and he rose and lit the gas. Blessed be the tie that binds, they were singing. He paused, with hand still in air, to listen. That well-worn phrase arrested his attention, and gave itself a new meaning. He was bound to these people, it was true, but he could never again harbour the delusion that the tie between them was blessed. There was vaguely present in his mind the consciousness that other ties were loosening as well. Be that as it might, one thing was certain. He had passed definitely beyond pretending to himself that there was anything spiritually in common between him and the Methodist church of Octavius. The necessity of his keeping up the pretense with others rose on the instant like a looming shadow before his mental vision. He turned away from it and bent his brain to think of something else. The noise of Alice opening the front door came as a pleasant digression. A second later it became clear from the sound of voices that she had brought someone back with her, and Theron hastily stretched himself out again in the armchair with his back on the pillow and his feet on the other chair. He had come mighty near forgetting that he was an invalid, and he protected himself the further now by assuming an air of lassitude verging upon prostration. Yes, there's a light burning, it's all right, he heard Alice say. She entered the room, and Theron's head was too bad to permit him to turn it, and see who her companion was. Theron, dear, she began, I knew you'd be glad to see her, even if you were out of sorts, and I persuaded her just to run in for a minute. Let me introduce you to Sister Soulsby, Sister Soulsby, my husband. The reverend Mr. Ware sat upright with an energetic start and fastened upon the stranger a look which conveyed anything but the satisfaction his wife had been so sure about. It was at first blush an undisguised scowl, and only some fleeting memory of that reflection about needing now to dissemble prevented him from still frowning as he rose to his feet, and perfunctorily held out his hand. Delighted, I'm sure, he mumbled, then looking up, he discovered that Sister Soulsby knew he was not delighted, and that she seemed not to mind in the least. As your good lady said, I just ran in for a moment, she remarked, shaking his limp hand with a brisk, business-like grasp and dropping it. I hate bothering sick people, but it's weird to be thrown together a good deal this next week or so. I thought I'd better lose no time in saying howdy. I won't keep you up now. Your wife has been sweet enough to ask me to move my trunk over here in the morning, so that you'll see enough of me and to spare. Theron looked falteringly into her face as he strove for words which would sufficiently mask the disgust this intelligence stirred within him. A debt-raiser in the town was bad enough. A debt-raiser quartered in the very parsonage. He ground his teeth to think of it. Alice read his hesitation aright. Sister Soulsby went to the hotel, she hastily put in, and Lauren Pierce was after her to come and stay at his house, and I ventured to tell her that I thought we could make her more comfortable here. She accompanied this by so daring a grimace and nod that her husband woke up to the fact that a point in conference politics was involved. He squeezed a doubtful smile upon his features. We shall both do our best, he said. It was not easy, but he forced increasing amiability into his glance and tone. Is Brother Soulsby here too? He asked. The debt-raiser shook her head, again the prompt, decisive movement, so like a busy man of affairs. No, she answered. He's doing supply work on the Hudson this week. But he'll be here in time for the Sunday morning love-feast. I always like to come on ahead and see how the land lies. Well, good night. Your head will be all right in the morning. Precisely what she meant by this assurance Theron did not attempt to guess. He received her adieu, noted the masterful manner in which she kissed his wife, and watched her pass out into the hall, with the feeling uppermost that this was a person who decidedly knew her way about. Much as he was prepared to dislike her, and as much as he detested the vulgar methods her profession typified, he could not deny that she seemed a very capable sort of woman. This mental concession did not prevent his fixing upon Alice when she returned to the room a glance of obvious disapproval. Theron, she broke forth to anticipate his reproach. I did it for the best. The pierces would have got her if I hadn't cut in. I thought it would help to have her on our side. And besides, I like her. She's the first sister I've seen since we've been in this whole that's had a kind word for me, or sympathized with me, and if you're going to be offended, I shall cry. There were real tears on her lashes, ready to make good the threat. Oh, I guess I wouldn't, said Theron, with an approach to his old half-playful manner. If you like her, that's the chief thing. Alice shook her teardrops away. No, she replied, with a wistful smile. The chief thing is to have her like you. She's as smart as a steel trap that woman is, and if she took the notion, I believe she could help get us a better place. CHAPTER XIV The ensuing week went by with a buzz in a whirl circling about Theron Ware's dizzy consciousness like some huge impalpable teetotum since spinning under Sister Solzby's resolute hands. Whenever his vagrant memory recurred to it, in after months, he began by marveling and ended with a shudder of repulsion. It was a week crowded with events which seemed to him to shoot past so swiftly that in effect they came all of a heap. He never essayed the task, in retrospect, of arranging them in their order of sequence. They had, however, a definite and interdependent chronology which it is worth the while to trace. Mrs. Solzby brought her trunk round to the parsonage bright and early on Friday morning, and took up her lodgement in the best bedroom, and her headquarters in the house at large, with a cheerful and business-like manner. She desired nothing so much, she said, as that people should not put themselves out on her account, or allow her to get in their way. She appeared to mean this, too, and to have very good ideas about securing its realization. During both Friday and the following day indeed, Theron saw her only at the family meals. There she displayed a hearty relish for all that was set before her, which quite won Mrs. Ware's heart, and though she talked rather more than Theron found himself expecting from a woman, he could not deny that her conversation was both seemly and entertaining. She had evidently been a great traveller, and referred to things she had seen in Savannah or Montreal or Los Angeles, in as matter-of-fact fashion, as he could have spoken of a visit to Tecumseh. Theron asked her many questions about these and other far-off cities, and her answers were also pat and showed so keen and clear an eye that he began in spite of himself to think of her with a certain admiration. She in turn plied him with inquiries about the principal pew-holders and members of his congregation, their means, their disposition, and the measure of their devotion. She put these queries with such intelligence and seemed to assimilate his replies with such an alert understanding that the young minister was spurred to put dashes of character in his descriptions, and set forth the idiosyncrasies and distinguishing earmarks of his flock, with which he felt afterward might have been too free a tongue. But at the time her fine air of appreciation held him captive, he gossiped about his parishioners as if he enjoyed it. He made a specially happy thumbnail sketch for her of one of his trustees, Erastus Winch, the loudmouth ostentatiously jovial and really cold-hearted cheese-buyer. She was particularly interested in hearing about this man. The personality of Winch seemed to have impressed her, and she brought the talk back to him more than once, and prompted Theron to the very threshold of indiscretion in his confidences on the subject. Save at mealtimes sister Solesby spent the two days out around among the Methodists of Octavius. She had little or nothing to say about what she thus saw and heard, but used it as the basis for still further inquiries. She told more than once, however, of how she had been pressed here or there to stay to supper or dinner, and how she had excused herself. I've knocked about too much, she would explain to the wares, not to fight shy of random country cooking. When I find such a born cook as you are, well, I know when I'm well off. Alice flushed with pleased pride at this, and Theron himself felt that their visitor showed great good sense. By Saturday noon the two women were calling each other by their first names. Theron learned with a certain interest that sister Solesby's Christian name was Candice. It was only natural that he should give even more thought to her than to her quaint and unfamiliar old Ethiopian name. She was undoubtedly a very smart woman. To his surprise, she had never introduced in her talk any of the stock religious and devotional phrases which official methodists so universally employed in mutual converse. She might have been an insurance agent or a schoolteacher visiting in a purely secular household so little parade of cant was there about her. He caught himself wondering how old she was. She seemed to have been pretty well over the whole American continent and that must take years of time. Perhaps however, the exertion of so much travel would tend to age one in appearance. Her eyes were still youthful, decidedly wise eyes, but still juvenile. They had sparkled with almost girlish merriment at some of his jokes. She turned them about a good deal when she spoke, making their glances fit and illustrate the things she said. He had never met anyone whose eyes played so constant and prominent a part in their owner's conversation. Theron had never seen a play, but he had encountered the portraits of famous queens of the drama several times in illustrated papers or shop windows, and it occurred to him that some of the most marked contortions of Sister Soulsby's eyes, notably a trick she had of rolling them swiftly round and plunging them, so to speak, into an intent yearning. One might almost say devouring gays at the speaker were probably employed by imminent actresses like Restory and Fanny Davenport. The rest of Sister Soulsby was undoubtedly subordinated in interest to those eyes of hers. Sometimes her face seemed to be reviving temporarily a comeliness which had been constant in former days. Then again it would look decidedly organically plain. It was the worn and loose skin face of a nervous middle-aged woman who had had more than her share of trouble and drank too much tea. She wore the collar of her dress rather low, and Theron found himself wondering at this because, though long and expansive, her neck certainly showed more cords and cavities than consorted with his vague ideal of statuesque beauty. Then he wondered at himself for thinking about it, and abruptly reigned in his fancy, only to find that it was playing with speculations as to whether her yellowish complexion was due to that tea-drinking or came to her as a legacy of southern blood. He knew that she was born in the south because she said so. From the same source he learned that her father had been a wealthy planter who was ruined by the war and sank into a premature grave under the weight of his accumulated losses. The large dark rings around her eyes grew deeper still in their shadows when she told about this, and her ordinarily sharp voice took on a mellow cadence with a soft, drawing accent, turning yews into ows, and having no oars to speak of. Theron had imbibed somewhere in earlier days the conviction that the south was the land of romance, of cavaliers and gallants and black eyes flashing behind mantillas and outspread fans, and somehow when Sister Solzby used this intonation she suggested all these things. But almost all her talk was in another key, a brisk, direct, idiomatic manner of speech, with an intonation hinting at no section in particular. It was merely that of the city-dweller as distinguished from the rustic. She was of about Alice's height, perhaps a shade taller. It did not escape the attention of the weirs that she wore clothes of a more stylish cut and a livelier arrangement of hues than any Alice had ever dared own. Even in lax-minded tire, the two talked of this in their room on Friday night, and Theron explained that congregations would tolerate things of this sort with a stranger which would be sharply resented in the case of local folk whom they controlled. It was on this occasion that Alice in turn told Theron she was sure Mrs. Solzby had false teeth, a confidence which she immediately regretted as an act of treachery to her sex. On Saturday afternoon, toward evening, Brother Solzby arrived, and was guided to the parsonage by his wife, who had gone to the depot to meet him. They must have talked over the situation pretty thoroughly on the way, for by the time the newcomer had washed his face and hands and put on a clean collar, Sister Solzby was ready to announce her plan of campaign in detail. Her husband was a man of small stature and, like herself, of uncertain age. He had a gentle, if rather dry, clean-shaven face, and wore his dust-colored hair long behind. His little figure was clad in black clothes of a distinctively clerical fashion, and he had a white neck cloth neatly tied under his collar. The wares noted that he looked clean and amiable rather than intellectually or spiritually powerful, as he took the vacant seat between theirs and joined them in concentrating attention upon Mrs. Solzby. This lady, holding herself erect and alert on the edge of the low, big, easy chair, had the air of presiding over a meeting. My idea is, she began, with an easy implication that no one else's idea was needed, that your quarterly conference when it meets on Monday must be adjourned to Tuesday. We will have the people all out tomorrow morning to love-feast, an announcement can be made there, and at the morning service afterward that a series of revival meetings are to be begun that same evening. Mr. Solzby and I can take charge in the evening, and we'll see to it that packs the house, fills the church to overflowing Monday evening, then we'll quietly turn the meeting into a debt-raising convention before they know where they are, and we'll wipe off the best part of the load. Now, don't you see? She turned her eyes full upon Theron, as she spoke. You want to hold your quarterly conference after the money's been raised, not before. I see what you mean, Mr. Ware responded gravely, but—but what? Sister Solzby interjected, with vivacity. Well, said Theron, picking his words, in the first place it would rest with the presiding elder to say whether an adjournment can be made until Tuesday, not with me. That's all right, leave that to me, said the lady. In the second place, Theron went on, still more hesitatingly, there seems a certain, what shall I say, indirection in—in getting them together for a revival and springing a debt-raising on them? Sister Solzby put in. By man alive, that's the best part of it. You ought to be getting some notion by this time what these Octavius folks of yours are like. I've only been here two days, but I've got their measure down to an allspice. Supposing you were to announce tomorrow that the debt was to be raised Monday, how many men with bank accounts would turn up, do you think? You could put them all in your eye, sir, all in your eye. Very possibly you're right, faltered the young minister. Right? Why, of course I'm right! She said, with placid confidence, you've got to take folks as you find them, and you've got to find them the best way you can. One place can be worked, managed in one way, and another needs quite a different way, and both ways would be dead frosts, complete failures in a third. Brother Solzby coughed softly here, and shuffled his feet for an instant on the carpet. His wife resumed her remarks with slightly abated animation and at a slower pace. My experience, she said, has shown me that the apostle was right. To properly serve the cause one must be all things to all men. I have known very queer things indeed turn out to be means of grace. You simply can't get along without some of the wisdom of the serpent. We are commanded to have it, for that matter. And now, speaking of that, do you know when the presiding elder arrives in town today, and where he is going to eat supper and sleep? Theron shook his head. All I know is he isn't likely to come here, he said, and added, sadly. I'm afraid he's not an admirer of mine. Perhaps that's not all his fault, commented Sister Solzby. I'll tell you something. He came in on the same train as my husband, and that old trustee Pierce of yours was waiting for him with his buggy, and I saw like a flash what was in the wind. And the minute the train stopped I caught the presiding elder, and invited him in your name to come right here and stay, told him you and Alice were just set on his coming. Wouldn't take no for an answer. Of course he couldn't come. I knew well enough he had promised old Pierce. But we got in our invitation anyway, and it won't do you any harm. Now that's what I call having some gumption. Wisdom of the serpent, and so on. I'm sure, remarked Alice, I should have been mortified to death if he had come. We lost the extension leaf to our table in moving, and four is all it'll see decently. Sister Solzby smiled winningly into the wife's honest face. Don't you see, dear? She explained patiently. I only asked him because I knew he couldn't come. A little butter spreads a long way, if it's only intelligently warmed. It was certainly very ingenious of you. Therein began, almost stiffly. Then he yielded to the humanities, and with a kindling smile added, and it was as kind as kind could be. I'm afraid you're wrong about it's doing me any good, but I can see how well you meant it, and I'm grateful. We could have sneaked in the kitchen table, perhaps, while he was out in the garden, and put on the extra long tablecloth, interjected Alice musingly. Sister Solzby smiled again at Sister Ware, but without any words this time, and Alice on the instant rose, with the remark that she must be going out to see about supper. I'm going to insist on coming out to help you, Mrs. Solzby declared. As soon as I've talked over one little matter with your husband, oh yes, you must let me help this time, I insist. As the kitchen door closed behind Mrs. Ware, a swift and apparently significant glance shot its way across from Sister Solzby's roving, eloquent eyes, to the calmer and smaller gray orbs of her husband. He rose to his feet, made some little explanation about being a gardener himself, and desiring to inspect more closely some rhododendrons he had noticed in the garden, and forthwith, moved decorously out by the other door into the front hall. They heard his footsteps on the gravel beneath the window, before Mrs. Solzby spoke again. You're right about the presiding elder, and you're wrong, she said. He isn't what one might call precisely in love with you. Oh, I know the story, how you got into that attire, and he stepped in and insisted on your being denied to Kumpsa and sent here instead. He was responsible for that, then, was he, broke in Theron with contracted brows. Why, don't you make any effort to find out anything at all? She asked, pertly enough, but with such obvious good nature that he could not but have pleasure in her speech. Why, of course he did it, who else do you suppose? Well, said the young minister, despondently, if he so much against me as all that, I might as well hang up my fiddle and go home. Sister Solzby gave a little involuntary groan of impatience. She bent forward, and, lifting her eyes, rolled them at him in a curve of downward motion, which suggested to his fancy the image of two eagles in a concerted pounce upon a lamb. My friend! She began, with a new note of impressiveness in her voice, if you'll pardon my saying it, you haven't got the spunk of a mouse. If you're going to lay down and let everybody trample over you just as they please, you're right. You might as well go home. But now here, this is what I wanted to say to you. Do you just keep your hands off these next few days and leave this whole thing to me? I'll pull it into ship-shape for you. No. Don't interrupt now. I've taken a liking to you. You've got brains, and you've got human nature in you and heart. What you lack is sabay, common sense. You'll get that too in time. And meanwhile, I'm not going to stand by and see you cut up and fed to the dogs for want of it. I'll get you through this scrape and put you on your feet again, right side up, with care, because, as I said, I like you. I like your wife, too, mind. She's a good, honest little soul, and she worships the very ground you tread on. Of course, as long as people will marry in their teens, the wrong people will get yoked up together. But that's neither here nor there. She's a kind, sweet little body, and she's devoted to you. And it isn't every intellectual man that gets even that much. But now it's a go, is it? You promise to keep quiet, do you, and leave the whole show absolutely to me? Shake hands on it. Sister Solzby had risen and stood now holding out her hand in a frank, manly fashion. Theron looked at the hand and made mental notes that there were a good many veins discernible on the small wrist. And that the forearm seemed to swell out more than would have been expected in a woman, producing such a general effect of leanness. He caught the shine of a thin bracelet band of gold under the sleeve. A delicate, significant odor just hinted its presence in the air about this outstretched arm, something which was not a perfume, yet deserved as gracious a name. He rose to his feet and took the proffered hand with a deliberate gesture, as if he had been cautiously weighing all the possible arguments for and against this momentous compact. I promise, he said gravely, and the two palms squeezed themselves together in an earnest clasp. Right you are, exclaimed the lady, once more with cheery vivacity. Mind, when it's all over, I'm going to give you a good, serious downright talking to, a regular hoeing over. I'm not sure I shan't give you a sound shaking into the bargain. You need it, and now I'm going out to help Alice. The Reverend Mr. Ware remained standing after his new friend had left the room, and his meditative face wore an even unusual air of abstraction. He strolled aimlessly over, after a time, to the desk by the window, and stood there looking out at the slight figure of Brother Solesby, who was bending over and attentively regarding some pink blossoms on a shrub, through what seemed to be a pocket magnifying glass. What remained uppermost in his mind was not this interesting woman's confident pledge of championship in his material difficulties. He found himself dwelling instead upon her remark about the incongruous results of early marriages. He wondered idly if the little man in the white tie, fussing out there over the rhododendron bush, had figured in her thoughts as an example of these evils. Then he reflected that they had been mentioned in clear relation to talk about Alice. Now that he faced this question, it was as if he had been consciously ignoring and putting it aside for a long time. How was it, he asked himself now, that Alice, who had once seemed so bright and keen-witted, who had in truth started out immeasurably his superior in swiftness of apprehension and readiness in humorous quips and conceits, should have grown so dull? For she was undoubtedly slow to understand things nowadays. Her absurd lugging-in of the extension-table problem, when the great strategic point of that invitation, foisted upon the presiding elder came up, was only the latest sample of a score of these heavy-minded exhibitions that recalled themselves to him. And outsiders were apparently beginning to notice it. He knew by intuition what those phrases, good, honest little soul, and kind, sweet little body, signified when another woman used them to a husband about his wife. The very employment of that word little was enough, considering that there was scarcely more than a hair's difference between Mrs. Soulsby and Alice, and that they were both rather tall than otherwise, as the stature of women went. What she had said about the chronic misfortunes of intellectual men in such matters gave added point to those meaning phrases. Nobody could deny that geniuses and men of conspicuous talent had, as a rule, all through history, contracted unfortunate marriages. In almost every case where their wives were remembered at all, it was on account of their abnormal stupidity or bad temper or something of that sort. Take Santipi, for example, and Shakespeare's wife, and, and, well, there was Byron and Boerlitten, and ever so many others. Of course there was nothing to be done about it. These things happened, and one could only put the best possible face on them, and live one's appointed life as patiently and contentedly as might be. And Alice undoubtedly merited all the praise which had been so generously bestowed upon her. She was good and honest and kindly, and there could be no doubt whatever as to her utter devotion to him. These were tangible, solid qualities which must always secure respect for her. It was true that she no longer seemed to be very popular among people. He questioned whether men, for instance, like Father Forbes and Dr. Ledzmar, would much care about her, visions of the wifeless and academic calm in which these men spent their lives, and existence consecrated to literature and knowledge, and familiarity with all the loftiest and noblest thoughts of the past rose and enveloped him in a cloud of depression. No such lot be his. He must labor along among ignorant and spiteful narrow-minded people, to the end of his days, pocketing their insults and fawning upon the harsh hands of jealous non-entities who happened to be his official masters, just to keep a roof over his head, or, rather, Alice's. He must sacrifice everything to this, his ambitions, his passionate desires to do real good in the world on a large scale, his mental freedom, yes, even his chance of having truly elevating intellectual friendships. For it was plain enough that the men whose friendship would be of genuine and stimulating profit to him would not like her. Now that he thought of it, she seemed latterly to make no friends at all. Suddenly as he watched in a blank sort of way, Brother Solesby take out a pin-knife and lop an offending twig from a rose-bush against the fence, something occurred to him. There was a curious exception to that rule of Alice's isolation. She had made at least one friend. Levi Gorange seemed to like her extremely. As if his mind had been a camera, Theron snapped a shutter down upon this odd, unbidden idea and turned away from the window. The sounds of an active, almost strenuous conversation in female voices came from the kitchen. Theron opened the door noiselessly and put in his head, conscious of something furtive in his intention. You must drain every drop of water off the spinach-mind before you put it over or else. It was Sister Solesby's sharp and penetrating tones which came to him. Theron closed the door again and surrendered himself once more to the circling whirl of his thoughts. CHAPTER XV A love-feast at nine in the morning opened the public services of a Sunday still memorable in the annals of Octavius' Methodism. This ceremony, which four times a year preceded the sessions of the Quarterly Conference, was not necessarily an event of importance. It was an occasion upon which the brethren and sisters who clung to the old-fashioned, primitive ways of the itinerant circuit riders let themselves go with emphasized independence, putting up more vehement prayers than usual, and adding a special fervor of noise to their amens and other interjections, and that was all. It was Theron's first love-feast in Octavius, and as the big classroom in the church basement began to fill up, and he noted how the men with ultra-radical views and the women clad in the most ostentatious drabs and grays were crowding into the front seats, he felt his spirit sinking. He had literally to force himself from sentence to sentence when the time came for him to rise and open the proceedings with an exhortation. He had eagerly offered this function to the presiding elder, the reverent Asiope Larrabee, who sat in severe silence on the little platform behind him, but had been informed that the dignitary would lead off in giving testimony later on. So Theron, feeling all the while the hostile eyes of the elder burning holes in his back, dragged himself somehow through the task. He had never known any such difficulty of speech before. The relief was almost overwhelming when he came to the customary part where all were adjured to be as brief as possible in witnessing for the Lord, because the time belongs to all the people and the discipline forbids the feast to last more than ninety minutes. He delivered this injunction to brevity with marked earnestness and then sat down abruptly. There was some rather boisterous singing, during which the stewards, beginning with the platform, past plates of bread cut in small cubes, and water in big-plated pitchers and tumblers, out among the congregation, threading their way between the long wooden benches ordinarily occupied at this hour by the children of the Sunday school and helping each brother and sister in turn. They held by the old custom here in Octavius, and all along the seats the sexes alternated, as they do at a polite dinner table. Theron impassively watched the familiar scene. The early nervousness had passed away. He felt now that he was not in the least afraid of these people, even with the presiding elder thrown in. Folks who sang with such unintelligence and who threw themselves with such undignified fervor into this childish business of the bread and water could not be formidable antagonists for a man of intellect. He had never realized before what a spectacle the Methodist love-feast probably presented to outsiders, what they must think of it. He had noticed that the souls be sat together, in the center and toward the front. Next to brother souls be sat Alice. He thought she looked pale and preoccupied, and set it down in passing to her innate distaste for the sombre garments she was wearing, and for the company she perforce found herself in. Another head was in the way, and for a time Theron did not observe who sat beside Alice on the other side. When at last he saw that it was Levi Gorange, his instinct was to wonder what the lawyer must be saying to himself about these noisy and shallow enthusiasts. A recurring emotion of loyalty to the simple people among whom, after all, he had lived his whole life, prompted him to feel that it wasn't wholly nice of Gorange to come and enjoy this revelation of their foolish side as if it were a circus. There was some vague memory in his mind which associated Gorange with other love-feasts, and with a cynical attitude toward them. Oh yes! He had told of how he went to one just for the sake of sitting beside the girl he admired and was pursuing. The stewards had completed their round, and the loud discordant singing came to an end. There ensued a little pause, during which Theron turned to the presiding elder with a gesture of invitation to take charge of the further proceedings. The elder responded with another gesture, calling his attention to something going on in front. Other and sister Solesby, to the considerable surprise of everybody, had risen to their feet and were standing in their places quite motionless and with an air of professional self-assurance dimly discernible under a large show of humility. They stood thus until complete silence had been secured. Then the woman, lifting her head, began to sing. The words were rock of ages, but no one present had heard the tune to which she wedded them. Her voice was full and very sweet, and had in it tender cadences which all her hearers found touching. She knew how to sing, and she put forth the words so that each was distinctly intelligible. There came a part where Brother Solesby, lifting his head in turn, took up a tuneful second to her air. Although the two did not, as one could hear by listening closely, sing the same words at the same time, they produced none the less most moving and delightful harmonies of sound. The experience was so novel and charming that listeners ran ahead in their minds to fix the number of verses there were in the hymn, and to hope that none would be left out. Toward the end, when some of the intolerably self-conceited local singers, fancying they had caught the tune, started to join in, they were stopped by an indignant shh, which rose from all parts of the classroom, and the Solesbys, with a patient and pensive kindness written on their uplifted faces, gave that verse over again. What followed seemed obviously restrained and modified by the effect of this unlooked-for and tranquilizing overture. The presiding elder was known to enjoy visits to old-fashioned congregations like that of Octavius, where he could indulge to the full his inner passion for high-pitched, passionate invocations, and violent spiritual demeanor, but this time he spoke temperately, almost soothingly. The most tempetuous of the local witnesses for the Lord gave in their testimony in relatively pacific tones, under the influence of the spell which good music had laid upon the gathering. There was the deepest interest as to what the two visitors would do in this way. Other Solesbys spoke first very briefly and in well-rounded and well-chosen, if conventional phrases. His wife, following him, delivered in a melodious monotone some equally hackneyed remarks. The assemblage, listening in rapt attention, felt the suggestion of reserved power in every sentence she uttered, and burst forth, as she dropped into her seat, in a loud chorus of approving ejaculations. The Solesbys had captured Octavius with their very first outer skirmish line. Everything seemed to move forward now with a new zest and spontaneity. Theron had picked out for the occasion the best of those sermons which he had prepared entire, at the time when he was justifying his ambition to be accounted a pulpit orator. It was orthodox enough, but had been planned as the framework for picturesque and emotional rhetoric rather than doctrinal edification. He had never dreamed of trying it on Octavius before, and only on the yesterday had quavered at his being daring in choosing it now. Nothing but the desire to show Sister Solesbys what was in him had held him to the selection. Something of this same desire, no doubt, swayed and steadied him now in the pulpit. The labored slowness of his beginning seemed to him to be due to nervous timidity until suddenly looking down into those big eyes of Sister Solesbys which were bent gravely upon him from where she sat beside Alice in the minister's pew. He remembered that it was instead the study deliberation which art had taught him. He went on feeling more and more that the skill and histrionic power of his best days were returning to him were as marked as ever, nay, had never triumphed before as they were triumphing now. The congregation watched and listened with open, steadfast eyes and parted lips. For the first time in all that weary quarter their faces shown, the sustaining sparkle of their gaze lifted him to a peroration unrivaled in his own recollection of himself. He sat down and bent his head forward upon the open Bible, breathing hard, but suffused with a glow of satisfaction. His ears caught the music of that sighing rustle through the audience which besieks a profound impression. He could scarcely keep the fingers of his hands, covering his bowed face in a devotional posture as they were, from drumming a jubilant tattoo. His pulses did this in every vein, throbbing with excited exultation. The insistent whim seized him, as he still bent thus before his people, to whisper to his own heart, at last, the dogs. The announcement that in the evening a series of revival meetings was to be inaugurated had been made at the love-feast, and it was repeated now from the pulpit, with the added statement that for the once the class meetings usually following this morning's service would be suspended. Then Theron came down the steps, conscious after a fashion, that the presiding elder had laid a propitiatory hand on his shoulder, and spoken amably about the sermon, and that several groups of more or less important parishioners were wading in the aisle and the vestibule to shake hands and tell him how much they had enjoyed the sermon. His mind perversely kept hold of the thought that all this came too late. He politely smiled his way along out, and, overtaking the soulsbees and his wife near the parsonage gate, went in with them. At the cold, picked-up, noonday meal, which was the Sunday rule of the house, Theron rather expected that his guests would talk about the sermon, or, at any rate, about the events of the morning. A sabbath chill seemed to have settled upon both their tongues. They ate almost in silence, and their sparse remarks touched upon topics far removed from church affairs. Alice, too, seemed strangely disinclined to conversation. The husband knew her face and its varying moods so well that he could see she was laboring under some very powerful and deep emotion. No doubt it was the sermon, the oratorical swing of which still tingled in his own blood, that had so affected her. If she had said so, it would have pleased him, but she said nothing. After dinner, Brother Soulsbe disappeared in his bedroom, with the remark that he guessed he would lie down a while. Sister Soulsbe put on her bonnet, and, explaining that she always prepared herself for an evening's work by a long, solitary walk, quitted the house. Alice, after she had put the dinner things away, went upstairs and stayed there. Left to himself, therein spent the afternoon in the easy chair, and in the intervals, of confused introspection, read, Recollections of my youth threw again from cover to cover. He went through the remarkable experiences, attending the opening of the revival, when evening came, as one in a dream. Long before the hour of the service arrived, the sexton came in to tell him that the church was already nearly full, and that it was going to be impossible to preserve any distinction in the matter of pews. When the party from the parsonage went over, after another cold and mostly silent meal, it was to find the interior of the church densely packed, and people being turned away from the doors. Theron was supposed to preside over what followed, and he did sit on the central chair in the pulpit between the presiding elder and Brother Soulsbe, and on several needful occasions did rise and perfunctorily make the formal remarks required of him. The elder preached a short, but vigorously phrased sermon. The Soulsbees sang three or four times, on each occasion with familiar hymnal words set to novel concerted music, and then separately exhorted the assemblage. The husband's part seemed well done. If his speech lacked some of the fire of the divine girdings which older Methodists recalled, it still led straight, and with kindling fervency, up to a season of power. The wife took up the word, as he sat down. She had risen from one of the side seats, and, speaking as she walked, she moved forward till she stood within the altar rail, immediately under the pulpit, and from this place, facing the listening throng, she delivered her harangue. Those who watched her words most intently got the least sense of meaning from them. The phrases were all familiar enough. Jesus of very present help, sprinkled by the blood, comforted by the word, sanctified by the spirit, born into the kingdom, and a hundred others. But it was, as in the case of her singing, the words were old, the music was new. What Sister Soulsbees said did not matter. The way she said it, the splendid searching sweep of her great eyes, the vibrating roll of her voice, now full of tears, now scornful, now boldly, jubilantly triumphant, the sympathetic swaying of her willowy figure under the stress of her eloquence, was all wonderful. When she had finished and stood, flushed in panting, beneath the shadow of the pulpit, she held up a hand deprecatingly, with the resounding amens, and blessed the lords, began to well up about her. You have heard us sing, she said, smiling to apologize for her shortness of breath, now we want to hear you sing. Her husband had risen as she spoke, and on the instant, with a far greater volume of voice than they had hitherto disclosed, the two began, from Greenland's icy mountains, in the old, familiar tune. It did not need Sister Soulsby's urgent and dramatic gesture to lift people to their feet. The wholest cymbals sprang up, and, under the guidance of these two powerful, leading voices, thundered the hymn out, as Octavius had never heard it before. While its echoes were still alive, the woman began speaking again, don't sit down, she cried. You would stand up if the President of the United States was going by, even if he was only going fishing. How much more should you stand up in honor of living souls passing forward to find their Savior? The psychological moment was upon them, groans and cries arose, and a palpable ferment stirred the throng. The exhortation to sinners to declare themselves, to come to the altar, was not only on the revivalist lips, it seemed to quiver in the very air, to be born on every inarticulate exclamation in the clamor of the brethren. A young woman, with a dazed and startled look in her eyes, rose in the body of the church, tremblingly hesitated for a moment, and then, with bowed head and blushing cheeks, pressed her way out from the end of a crowded pew, and down the aisle to the rail. A triumphant outburst of welcoming ejaculations swelled to the roof as she knelt there, and under its impetus others followed her example. With interspersed snatches of song and shouted encouragements, the excitement reached its height only when two score people, mostly young, were tightly clustered upon their knees about the rail, and in the space opening upon the aisle. Above the confusion of penitential sobs and moans, and the hysterical murmurings of members whose conviction of entire sanctity kept them in their seats, could be heard the voices of the presiding elder, the soulsbees, and the elderly deacons of the church, who moved about among the kneeling mourners, bending over them and patting their shoulders, and calling out to them, fasten your thoughts on Jesus, O the precious blood, blessed be his name, seek him, and ye shall find him, clean to Jesus, and him crucified. The reverend Theron Ware did not, with the others, descend from the pulpit. Seated where he could not see sister soulsbee, he had failed utterly to be moved by the wave of enthusiasm she had evoked. What he heard her say disappointed him. He had expected from her more originality, more spice of her own idiomatic individual sort. He viewed, with a cold sense of aloofness, the evidences of her success when they began to come forward and abase themselves at the altar. The instant resolved that, come what might, he would not go down there among them, sprang up ready-made in his mind. He saw his two companions pass him and descend the pulpit stares, and their action only hardened his resolution. If an excuse were needed, he was presiding, and the place to preside in was the pulpit. But he waved in his mind the whole question of an excuse. After a little, he put his hand over his face, leaning the elbow forward on the reading desk. The scene below would have thrilled him to the marrow six months, yes, three months ago. He put a finger across his eyes now, to half shut it out. The spectacle of these silly young mourners, kneeling they knew not why, trembling that they could not tell what, pledging themselves frantically to dogmas and mysteries they knew nothing of, under the influence of a hubbub of outcries as meaningless in their way, and inspiring in much the same way as the racket of a fife and drum-core. The spectacle saddened and humiliated him now. He was conscious of a dawning sense of shame, at being even tacitly responsible for such a thing. His fancy conjured up the idea of Dr. Ledzmar coming in and beholding this maudlin and unseemly scene, and he felt his face grow hot at the bare thought. Looking through his fingers, Theron all at once saw something which caught at his breath with a sharp clutch. Alice had risen from the minister's pew, the most conspicuous one in the church, and was moving down the aisle toward the rail, her uplifted face chalk-like in its whiteness, and her eyes wide open, looking straight ahead. The young pastor could scarcely credit his sight. He thrust aside his hand and bent forward, only to see his wife sink upon her knees among the rest, and to hear this notable accession to the mourners hailed by a tumult of approving shouts. Then, remembering himself, he drew back and put up his hand, shutting out the strange scene altogether. To see nothing at all was a relief, and undercover he closed his eyes and bit his teeth together. A fresh outburst of thanksgivings, spreading noisily through the congregation, prompted him to peer through his fingers again. Levi Gorange was making his way down the aisle, was at the moment quite in front. Theron found himself watching this man with the stern composure of a fatalist. The claimant brethren, down below, were stirred to a new excitement by the thought that the skeptical loyer, so long with them yet not of them, had been humbled and won by the outpourings of the spirit. Theron's perceptions were keener. He knew that Gorange was coming forward to kneel beside Alice. The knowledge left him curiously undisturbed. He saw the loyer advance, gently insinuate himself past the form of some kneeling mourner who was in his way, and drop on his knees close beside the bowed figure of Alice. The two touched shoulders as they bent forward, beneath Sister Solzby's outstretched hands, held over them as in a blessing. Theron looked fixedly at them and professed to himself that he was barely interested. A little afterward he was standing up in his place, and reading aloud a list of names which one of the stewards had given him, they were the names of those who had asked that evening to be taken into the church as members on probation. The sounds of the recent excitement were all hushed now, save as two or three enthusiasts in a corner raised their voices in abrupt greeting of each name in its turn. But Theron felt somehow that this noise had been transferred to the inside of his head. A continuous buzzing went on there, so that the sound of his voice was far off and unfamiliar in his ears. He read through the list, comprising some fifteen items, and pronounced the names with great distinctness. It was necessary to take pains with this, because the only name, his blurred eyes, seemed to see anywhere on the fool's cap sheet, was that of Levi Goranj. When he had finished and was taking his seat, someone began speaking to him from the body of the church. He saw that this was the steward, who was explaining to him that the most important name of the lot, that of Brother Goranj, had not been read out. Theron smiled and shook his head, then, when the presiding elder touched him on the arm, and assured him that he had not mentioned the name in question, he replied quite simply and with another smile. I thought it was the only name I did read out. Then he sat down abruptly, and let his head fall to one side. There were hurried movements inside the pulpit, and people in the audience had begun to stand up wonderingly when the presiding elder, with uplifted hands, confronted them. We will omit the doxology and depart quietly after the benediction, he said. Brother Ware seems to have been overcome by the heat.