CAMILLA went up Bank Street, and took a car at the corner of Franklin Street. It carried her past the Court House Square, and so on to the little three-cornered park, where stood the Seton Avenue Assembly Hall, and opposite the Hall the block of grey houses with bay windows, of which the third from the corner was Mrs. Tillotson's.

That lady saw Camilla through the window and met her at the door.

“My dear! My dear! There is no one here! Positively! And my little drawing-room usually thronged! Now, we can have such a talk, such an earnest talk! We women must unite. The Assembly must take a position.”

She sat by Camilla on the sofa and clasped her hand.

“I—I don't quite understand,” said Camilla.

“Surely, my dear, the two most important questions before the Assembly are these: First, shall we, or shall we not, support Mr. Hennion? second, shall we, or shall we not, adopt a fixed form of service, more ornate and beautiful? Mr. Berry takes the affirmative of both, Mr. Ralbeck the negative. I am at present in the position of a reconciler. I have in particular devoted myself to the latter question. I have examined thoroughly the ritual of the Roman Catholic Church. I have offered Mr. Aidee all my knowledge, all my literary experience. But he does not as yet take a position!”

Camilla promised a number of things, and asked for Aidee. Mrs. Tillotson thought he was at the Hall. He had not been to lunch. She was of the opinion that Mr. Aidee was distinctly avoiding her, knowing that she would insist on his taking a position, knowing her to be right in insisting.

Camilla escaped, and crossed the Avenue to the little side door that led into a hallway, out of which opened a room used by Aidee for a study. The door on the street was ajar. She had never entered that door before. She knew the windows of the study from without.

She entered the dusky hallway and knocked at the door of the study, but no one answered. She hesitated, and drew back, and then tried the knob. The door yielded and opened, but the room was empty.

In the growing dusk the corners of it were quite dark. It seemed bare, half-furnished—some books in a case, a matting, a flat littered table, a few chairs. She grasped at the sides of the open door, for the room seemed to darken and lighten alternately, and be so full of meaning as to be ghostly, seeing that no one sat at the littered table, or was even hiding, crouching in the darkened corners. The large square windows seemed to look inward rather than outward, as if the centre of interest were within, and everything outside were meaningless. Yet the room was empty.

She gave a little moan of disappointment and helplessness. He must be hiding and suffering somewhere. She must protect him from the cruel, clattering noises and tongues outside! the dull, selfish, heartless people outside, to whom the prophet and martyr was forever coming and forever rejected, wounded by blind accidents, by people blind as accidents! So pitiful! so intolerable! So strange that the room should be empty of Aidee, and yet full of him! She could fancy him there, pacing the yellow matting, staring at the window, thinking, thinking.

She turned back from the half-lit room to the darkened hallway, and saw that another door opened out of it at the end furthest from the door on the street. Wherever it led, he might be there.

She opened it bravely, and saw only a little corridor, crooking suddenly to the left and even darker than the outer hallway. She felt her way along the plastered wall to the corner, and beyond that in the darkness felt the panels of a final door. She opened it, half expecting a closet or cellar stair, and almost cried out, for the great, dim, glowing, glimmering space of the Assembly Hall was before her, with its windows now turning grey from the outer twilight; but its vaulted roof, its pillars and curved galleries of brown oak could be distinguished, its ranged tiers of seats, its wide, curved, carpeted platform, its high bulk of gilded organ pipes. She had seen it before only when the tiers of seats had been packed with people, when Aidee had filled the remaining space with his presence, his purposes, and his torrent of speech; when the organ had played before and after, ushering in and following the Preacher with its rolling music; when great thoughts and sounds, and multitudes of staring and listening people had been there, where now it was so empty, so lonely and still. Silvery dim bars of light slanted from the windows downward to the centre of the hall, and the varnished backs of the seats shone in long concentric curves. Lines of darkness lay between them; deep darkness was under the galleries; shadows clustered in the vault overhead, shadows on the platform below the organ, where stood the Preacher's high-backed seat. Aidee had given the Hall what living meaning it had. Empty, it was still haunted by his voice, haunted by his phrases.

Camilla held her breath and stared from the little dark door, across the Hall, and saw Aidee standing by one of the gallery pillars. She started forward. Aidee came slowly from under the gallery to meet her.

“Camilla!”

“Oh! Why didn't you come?”

“Come?”

“To me. I thought you would!”

He stood silently before her, and seemed absorbed and constrained.

“When did you know?” she asked, and he answered mechanically, “This morning. I went down and saw the crowd under the window. I heard them talking. A newspaper reporter told me. Then I went to the bridge, but there was another crowd there, looking down at the water. So I came back.”

They sat down in one of the seats. Camilla felt both excited and constrained. She was afraid to go on. During the dumb hour she had spent in the store-room, she had felt that life was plainly a ruinous affair, and that she was somehow touched by a horrible wickedness and stained forever. She imagined, shrinking, some disclosure and disgrace. She pictured Henry Champney's amazement and grief. And then it all had been swept from her mind by the thought of Aidee, suffering somewhere alone. But now that she had found him, she found him reserved and quiet, and she seemed to stop on the edge of a gulf or crater, to peer over, to expect some red, rending explosion, but it was all still and dim there; and it stared up at her coldly and quietly.

“I came, because I thought I could help,” she said. “I thought it would help us both.”

“Are you troubled? You'd better let it go. It's the end of that story. I've fought it out now. I'm free of it.”

“What do you mean?”

They stared closely in the dusk into each other's eyes. Then she dropped her head, and wept with her face in her hands.

“It's not your story,” said Aidee.

“Yes, it is! It's mine!”

Then she raised her head, and he saw her wet eyes glisten in the dimness, and she said: “Teach me what it means.” And a dull shock went through him threaded by a sharp pain, a sensation so penetrating as to resemble pain, and desirable enough to be called happiness, and yet not like any pain or happiness in the remembered stretch of his concentrated and brooding life. That life, as he looked back on it, he saw starting from the old farmhouse on the plain, with its fallen fences and dry fields, the tired face of his mother in the house door, the small impish face of “Lolly” by his side. Next followed the big brick schoolhouse in the village, the schoolroom that he disliked, the books that he loved, the smoky chimney of his lamp, the pine table and the room where he studied; from which he would have to go presently down into the street and drag Lolly out of some raging battle with other boys, struggling and cursing, up to their room, where Lolly would turn on him in a moment with queer, twisted, affectionate smile, and clinging arms—“I ain't mad now, Al.” Then he saw the press-room in St. Louis, he saw Lolly imprisoned and then suddenly gone. He saw the mines and the crumbling mountain slopes in Nevada, the sheds, the dump cart, the spot where he had poured out first his long pent-up dreams to a rugged, astonished audience, and where that new passion of speech had come to him, that had seemed to fill the craving void in his heart; the spot where he had met the circuit-riding bishop and T. M. Secor. Then came his early success in Port Argent and the organisation of the Assembly; then the attack on Wood, and the growing sense of futility, in that while many listened and praised, little happened and little came of their listening or approval. “They take me for an actor, and the Assembly for a comedy,” he had thought bitterly, and he had written “The Inner Republic,” and the book that had brought to him Camilla Champney, eager and pureeyed, and asking, “What does it mean? It is my story too!”

What did it mean? Lolly lay dead in the ooze of the Muscadine and Port Argent was come to be a horror. He seemed so plainly to have failed, so drearily was Lolly dead, and all the fire in his own soul dead too, gone out in cinders, and his theory of life cracked like a hollow nutshell. He would go back to the mines, or to the slums and shops, and live again with the sweating hordes, among whom the grim secret of life lay, if anywhere; and when next he preached, he would preach the bitterest fact loudest. No, rather, if life is hopeless let us dig in the earth and say nothing. But Camilla! What of Camilla? And what did she mean? Her story too! He began to speak slowly, but presently grew rapid and eager.

“How can I explain? I never knew my fellow men, nor cared for them. They were no brothers of mine. I had but one. I never loved another human being, not these twenty years, but I had the kin instinct like hunger. Allen and I were rooted together. I thought I was a prophet, who was no more than a savage. Men are brothers by blood or interest, but for the rest they fight the old war that began before the earth had a decent crust to cover its chaos. Brotherhood of wildcats!”

“Oh, no! no!” she cried.

“For your sake, no, Camilla! Oh, through you I could hope again! You will save me, I will cut the past out and bury it, I will begin again. I will count this place with the dead and leave it forever. I need you. Come with me, my wife and hope and guide. Camilla, help me!”

“No, no!”

His sharp, strained voice frightened her. His eyes glittered and his face was white below his black hair. His intensity frightened her. The future he pointed to threatened her like an overhanging cloud, the struggle in her own heart frightened her.

“You said the story was yours. Camilla, tell me so again! We'll blot it out. I will forget! I need you! Come away from this ghastly city!”

Now she saw her father in his library, his white head bent. He was waiting and listening for her footsteps; and Dick seemed to be standing over him, listening for her to come; and Aunt Eunice, near by, was listening.

“I can't!” she cried. “I can't!”

“You must! Camilla! We will go away. It would be possible with you. I'll find a truth yet that doesn't lead to hell. I'll be a leader yet. Camilla, look at me!” She lifted her face and turned slowly toward him, and a voice spoke out in the distant, dark doorway, saying, “Milly!”—and then hesitated, and Hennion came out.

“I heard you crying,” he said quietly. “I didn't seem to be able to stand that.”

“Dick! Take care of me!” she cried, and ran to him, and put her face against his arm. The two men looked at each other for a moment.

Aidee said, “I'm answered.”

“I think you gave me a close call,” said Hennion, and drew Camilla past him into the passage, and followed her a few steps. Then he turned back, thinking:

“A fanatic is a term that mostly defines the definer, instead of the person meant to be defined. Sometimes it defines the man who uses it, as dense.”

At any rate Aidee was a force and had a direction, and force ought not to be wasted that way, for the credit of dynamics. So Hennion justified himself, and then confused his motive by thinking, “It's hardly a square game besides.” He stepped from the door into the dim Hall again, and said slowly:

“By the way, I saw Hicks last one night, some two weeks ago, and he told me who he was. He intended, I believe, to leave a message for you. Maybe he mentioned it to you. I think he told no one else who he was.”

Hennion paused. Aidee made no motion nor sound, but stood stiffly resistant.

“Well, you see, this morning, Jimmy Shays, the shoemaker, brought me that chisel. It seems Hicks used it last on Coglan, and then left it behind him, which was rather careless. Well, I knew the tool. The fact is, it was mine. Strikes me you might as well have gone somewhere else for your hardware.”

Still no sound.

“However, being mine, I took the liberty of pitching it into the river, where it really belonged, and swore Jimmy into a state of collapsed secrecy. Consequently, I'm in collusion. Consequently, I'm mentioning this to you in order to clean up the ground between us. It makes no great difference. That's all right. I only wanted to point out that you're clear of the mess. Now, there's a job for you in Port Argent. I think you can fill the place rather better—better than anyone else. Will you stay?”

“No.”

“Oh! But I've heard it said, political power was safe in the hands of those who had to make a sacrifice in order to accept it.”

“I won't make it.”

“It turns out a hypocritical sacrifice for me, you know. I'm on the highroad to corruption. You might stay in Port Argent and keep me honest. Will you?”

“No.”

“All right. Good-night.”

The little side streets between Seton Avenue and Maple Street were shaded by young maples, the street lamps frequent, and now being lit. Hennion and Camilla walked slowly. She shivered once or twice, and half sobbed, and clung to him. They talked very little at first.

“Milly,” he said at last, “of course, you know, I'm backing you, anyway. You shall do as you like.”

“I know, Dick. You're good. You're very good to me.”

“Well—maybe I'm wrong—I've been that before—but it looks to me in this way, that, after all, most impossible things are possible somehow, or somehow else, and it's better to go straight at the steep places. It stirs your blood to see how steep they are. I don't know altogether—I don't ask—but if you see anything that looks steep ahead, why, perhaps it is, perhaps it is—but then, what of it? And that's the moral I've been hedging around to, Milly.”

After a silence she asked, “How did you know I was there?”

“I thought it likely.”

He told her of his talk with Hicks in the cell, and how Shays, the shoemaker, had come to him that morning, but he omitted the fact that the chisel had been “used on Coglan.” Passing that point, he went on, comfortably comforting.

“You know, people don't own all the miscellaneous consequences of what they do. For instance, I knew Coglan. He was a blackguard and loafer, and generally drunk, and his death was rather a judicious selection. Hicks was a curious man. Maybe he wasn't quite sane. He jumped into the river on his own notion, to the happy relief of the public, which might have had scruples about hanging him. Still, you must see that as you didn't arrange all these social benefits, they'll have to be credited to your good luck, if they're credited at all. Aidee helped him to break jail, which was natural enough. It's a debatable moral maybe, if anyone wants to debate it, but who wants to? I'm no casuist, anyway. He shouldn't have come to you. But since he did, why, of course you'd do something of the kind, same as the wind blows. I know you, Milly. Is it your part in it that troubles you? You'd better take my judgment on it.”

“What is it?” she said, half audibly.

“My judgment? Only that I want you for myself.”

He went on quietly after a pause: “There are objections to interfering with the law, if your conscience means that. Those who try it, I think, don't often know what they're doing. If they do it theoretically, they're staking a small experience against a big one. The chances of being right are mainly against them. Aren't they? It looks so. Your getting mixed with that kind of thing or people, is—would be, of course, rather hard on us, on Mr. Champney and me. But your nerve was good. Is that what you want my judgment on?”

They turned up the path to the Champney house.

“You knew all about it!” she said hurriedly. “But you don't understand. It was because I thought him so great and noble, and I do! I do! Oh, he is! But I'm not brave at all. No, you don't know! He asked me to help, and it was so dark and painful, what he meant to do before he came again. It frightened me. He asked me to marry him, and break off everything here, and I was afraid! I'm a coward! I wouldn't do it because I was afraid. I'm a coward.”

“Did, did he?” said Hennion comfortably. “That was good nerve, too.”

“You don't understand,” she said with a small sob, and then another.

“Maybe not. But I think you had other reasons.”

They looked in through the tall library window, and saw Henry Champney sitting alone by his table, the gas jet flaring over him, and his white head dropped over on his hand. Hennion went on: “There's some of this business that it doesn't suit me to argue about or admit. But it occurs to me that”—pointing toward the window—“that may have been a reason.”

“You do understand that,” she said, and they went in together.