CHAPTER XXIV

Christianity has hitherto only partially, feebly, and waveringly taught its great doctrine. Christendom has not believed its own gospel. Forsaking the vital religion of Jesus, and of all the heroes and saints as impracticable, men have put up with a sort of conventional Christianity, from which the great essential ideas of the Golden Rule and the real presence of God were dropped out.

“I have spoken for three nights in this place, and for three nights you have heard me patiently. I have not regarded the favour of any man, but neither have I wished to bruise or wound. And yet, as I stand here now for the last time, I must declare the whole truth as it has been given to me. I have charged upon our present social and industrial conditions grave responsibility. To-night I declare plainly that you who calmly accept and profit by them, whether you know it or whether you know it not, are rejecting Jesus of Nazareth and his kingdom.”

The speaker was John Gregory, the place a large hall in the city of Burlington, crowded to its utmost with eager listeners, for the theories which he proclaimed were new and startling in that day.

As in his earlier revival preaching, so now, Gregory’s utterance was attended with peculiar power. There was this difference, however, between his relation to his audience now and in that other time: then a familiar appeal was reËnforced, even though involuntarily and unconsciously, by the full weight of his personal and psychic influence; now he relied wholly, it appeared, upon the dynamic of his message. His manner was more impassioned than in that earlier time, but less exciting.

Keith and Anna Burgess, from their places in the audience with Mrs. Ingraham, whose guests they were, watched and listened with almost breathless intensity of interest. They had not heard it on this wise before.

“Do you remember,” continued Gregory, with searching emphasis, “that on a certain day the Master said, ‘Verily I say unto you, That a rich man shall hardly enter into the kingdom of heaven’? Do you remember how the twelve men who followed him were said to have been ‘exceedingly amazed’? From the fourth century, when the Church and the world formed their unhallowed union, down to the present day, men have continued to be ‘exceedingly amazed’ at a saying so inconvenient and so revolutionary, and have set themselves to blunt its sharp edge or to explain it away altogether.

“To-night I am here to say to you plainly, This is a faithful saying, worthy of all acceptation, and woe unto him who seeks to take it away from the words of Christ. Put with it, if you will, other like words from the lips of Christ and his Apostles, rather than seek to abate the force of these. But why are the rich condemned? Surely they are the most law-abiding, most influential class in every community! Because the riches of the rich man are founded upon a lie! This is the lie: that a man has the right to build up his own prosperity and enjoyment upon the suffering and privation of his fellow-men.

“Ask yourselves, men who listen to me now, do I tell the truth?

“You made your money in trade; very well—is trade just? Could you, under present conditions, have made money, had you dealt justly and loved mercy? had you lived the truth, shown the truth? Could your trade have prospered if you had followed the simplest rule of Christ, ‘Do unto others as ye would have them do unto you?’

“Is not the very basis of your trade and of your gains that you force other men into failure, dejection, and poverty, and rise upon the wreck of them? Well has it been said, ‘A rich man’s happiness is built up of a thousand poor men’s sorrows.’

“Many men make their money in manufacture, perhaps not largely so in this city; but the conditions are familiar to us all. Very well, is manufacture true to God, true to men?

“The profits, we will say of a given manufacture, were not great enough last year; the owners had a large income, but not as large as they wanted; some of the rich stockholders grumbled. What did they do? They reduced the beggarly wages of the toilers in their iron prisons, sent them home to their wives and children with less than sufficed to give them daily bread and shelter, and they knew it. They sent pure girls to the life of shame, and honest men to the black refuge of despair. Thus they declared their dividend, and their rich neighbours praised their business genius and pocketed their share of the gains complacently; and the rich grew richer, and the poor, poorer. This done, they come before God with pious words; they pass boxes in the churches to gather the widows’ and the orphans’ mites whose burdens they do not lift, no, not with one finger; they build a hospital now and then; they found a university, and their names are exalted; they sit in their homes with all their treasures of art, of intellect, and of refinement about them, and thank the Lord that they are not as other men are, or even as that poor fellow they hear reeling, profane and drunken, down the street, because no home is his, no hope, no God.

“Hear the words which God hath sworn by his holy prophets:

“‘Forasmuch, therefore, as your treading is upon the poor, and ye take from him burdens of wheat; ye have built houses of hewn stone, but ye shall not dwell in them; ye have planted pleasant vineyards, but ye shall not drink wine of them.

“‘For I know your manifold transgressions and your mighty sins; they afflict the just, they take a bribe, and they turn aside the poor in the gate from their right.

“‘Woe to the City of Blood!

“‘Woe unto them that join house to house, that lay field to field, till there be no place, that they may be placed alone in the midst of the earth!

“‘Woe to them that are at ease in Zion!... that lie upon beds of ivory and stretch themselves upon their couches, and eat the lambs out of the flock, and the calves out of the midst of the stall, that chant to the sound of the viol and invent to themselves instruments of music, ... that drink wine in bowls and anoint themselves with the chief ointments; but they are not grieved for the affliction of Joseph!

“‘Woe to him that buildeth a town with blood, and establisheth a city by iniquity!

“‘Neither their silver nor their gold shall be able to deliver them in the day of the Lord’s wrath.

“‘For, behold, the Lord said unto me, What seest thou? And I said, A plumb-line. Then said the Lord, Behold, I will set a plumb-line in the midst of my people Israel: I will not again pass by them any more.

“‘For judgment will I lay to the line and righteousness to the plumb-line: and the hail shall sweep away the refuge of lies, and the waters shall overflow the hiding-place.

“‘For ye have said, We have made a covenant with death, and with hell are we at agreement; we have made lies our refuge, and under falsehood have we hid ourselves.

“‘But your covenant with death shall be disannulled and your agreement with hell shall not stand.’”

As the speaker went on marshalling and massing with stern conviction the tremendous indictments and declarations of the Hebrew prophets, which the people before him had never heard thus definitely applied to their own social conditions, the dramatic effect became irresistible. A mighty blast of wind seemed to bow their heads, and many trembled and grew pale.

Suddenly John Gregory, whose whole face and figure had been rigid and set with the awe of what he spoke, stepped out to the very edge of the platform, and, with a gesture of gentleness and reconcilement, and a smile which relaxed the tense mood of his hearers, cried:—

“But this is not all! Never did the prophets leave the people without a ray of hope—never did they withhold

These words were spoken with no less conviction than those which had gone before, but the change of voice, of expression, of attitude and gesture, were those which only a master of oratory could have so swiftly effected. The audience, now wholly under his control, felt a new thrill of comfort, of hope, even of exultation.

“The Spirit of God is brooding in the bosom of all this chaos, and a new day dawns. Fear not, but look within. Your own heart confesses the bond of brotherhood which unites you to all the race. Let your heart speak.

“Men everywhere see the new light, and confess and deny not that it is the true light, the light which lighteth every man coming into the world, until sin and selfishness quench it.

“The day is come when men shall no longer greedily seek their own salvation; the straitened individualism of the fathers has had its day; even the passion for personal perfection is refined selfishness from the new point of view. Many Christian souls have been misled in the past by the mistaken idea of self-sacrifice and renunciation, not for their results to humanity, but for the perfecting of self, a fruitless, joyless, Christless thing. The continual seeking for the safety here and hereafter of the individual—the man’s own advantage, what if spiritual?—held up always as his chief and noblest aim, have resulted in Christianity becoming a symbol for sublimated selfishness.

“A greater, nobler motive is ours to-day—no new gospel, but a right reading of the old, a deeper insight into his purpose who said, ‘If any man serve me, let him follow me.’

“Here may we, at last, and perhaps for the first time in long years of blind and baffled longing for the fellowship of Christ our Sacrifice, learn the awful joy of dying in our own lives that so we may not live alone.

“Your soul cannot rise toward God, my brother, while you are treading down other souls beneath your feet. Cease the hopeless effort. Take the world’s burden on your heart, and you shall know Christ. Refuse the joys which can only be for the few and the rich. Take nothing but what you can share. Learn poverty and simplicity and hardihood; unlearn luxury, exclusiveness, epicureanism. Be pioneers in the new state, apostles of the new-old gospel—the Gospel of Brotherhood, of Fellowship, of Sacrifice.”

As Anna Mallison, in her early girlhood, had responded with swift, unquestioning response to the simple appeal of the missionary, and had offered herself unreservedly to the work of seeking lost souls in the heathen world, so now, in the maturity of her womanhood, her inmost soul confessed that her hour had come. The message of John Gregory, heard vaguely and partially before, had now reached her fully, and she found its claim upon her irresistible.

“Where this leads, I follow,” a voice said in her heart; “I follow though I die! It is for this I have waited.”

Turning, she looked into her husband’s face, and their eyes met. Keith Burgess read what he intuitively expected in the deep awe of Anna’s eyes; while she read in his a sympathy and response, real, and yet strangely sad.

Gregory had been about to leave the platform, his address ended; but the audience sat unmoving, as if they would hear more. A man rose up then, in the middle of the hall, and spoke.

“Mr. Gregory,” he said, “some of the people are saying that, having told us so much, you ought to tell us more. If it is true that you have some scheme or system by which people like us could live such a life as you describe, we want to hear about it.”

Having so said, he sat down.

John Gregory turned about and came slowly back to his former place. Here he stood, confronting the people with a gravely musing smile. Again, as she saw him, there swept over Anna’s memory the sense that this was the presence of her girlish dream, and the old indefinable sense of joy in the power of this man was shed into her heart.

“You want to hear me say something about Fraternia, I suppose,” said Gregory, slowly.

“I am not here for that purpose. I covet no man’s silver or gold for my project, let that be distinctly understood first of all. Fraternia has not had to beg for support, thus far. Men and women who are like-minded with ourselves are welcome to join themselves to us. No others need apply,” and he smiled a peculiar, humorous smile of singular charm.

“Fraternia,” he continued, “is an experiment. It is only a year old. Is is what may be called a coÖperative colony, I should think; that is, a little community of people who believe that no one ought to be idle and no one ought to overwork, and accordingly all work a reasonable number of hours a day. We also believe that an aristocratic, privileged class is not a good thing, not even a necessary evil, but a mere gross product of human selfishness. We have none, accordingly, in Fraternia, nor anything corresponding to it. We are all on a precisely equal footing. That bitterest and tightest of all class distinctions, the aristocracy of money, is unknown among us. Those who have joined us have thus far put their property into the common treasury, and all fare alike. We propose to work out this social problem on actual and practical lines. We all work and all share alike in the results of our work.

“You will ask what we do. Fraternia lies in a valley among the foothills of southwestern North Carolina. We raise all kinds of fruit, some grain, and some cotton. We have water-power, a mountain stream as beautiful as it is useful, and so we have built a cotton mill. We have made it as pretty as we could, this mill,—better than any man’s house, since the house is for the individual, and the mill for the use of all. By the same token our church and our library are to be finer than our houses when we advance so far as to build them. We have nothing costly or luxurious in Fraternia, but our mill is really very attractive. We all like to work in it. You know it is natural to like to work under human and decent conditions. I believe no man ever liked absolute idleness. It is overwork and work under hideous and unwholesome conditions against which men revolt.

“In our personal and home life, simplicity and hardihood are the key-notes. No servants are employed, for all serve. Our luxuries are the mountain laurel and pine, the exquisite sky and air, the voices of the forest, the crystal clearness of the brook. In these we all share. So do we in the books and the few good pictures which we are so happy as to own; in the best music we can muster and in the service of divine worship. Life is natural, homely, simple, joyous. Its motive: By love, serve one another. From no one is the privilege of service withheld. Thank God, we have no forlorn leisure class.

“Our mission, however, is not to ourselves alone, but to the world outside. We are holding up, by our daily living, a constant object-lesson. We are preaching coÖperation and social brotherhood louder than any voice can ever preach it, and the small child and the simple girl can preach as well as the cultured woman and the strong man.

“Who are we? We are mostly from England, many from the slums of London, others from its higher circles, some Germans and Scandinavians, and thus far not more than a dozen American families. Some of us had nothing to begin with, and some had large property; some were so unfortunate as to belong to the number of those who oppress the poor in mills and mines, while others were simple peasants. We have no difficulty in living happily together on the broad basis of a common human nature, a common purpose, and a common hope.

“But there is another side to this adventure, friends,” and Gregory spoke with deeper seriousness. “Fraternia is nothing unless it is builded on the immutable laws of God and of righteousness. Never, never can we succeed if sin grows little to us and self large. Our message will be taken from us, our arm will be paralyzed, if the day shall ever come when the lust of gold, the lust of power, the lust of pride, shall taint the free air of our high valley.

“So then, if any among you would join our ranks, see that you shrive your souls and come to us seeking only the Kingdom of God and his righteousness.”

Sin and hedgehogs are born without spikes, but how they wound and prick after their birth we all know. The most unhappy being is he who feels remorse before the deed, and brings forth a sin already furnished with teeth in its birth, the bite of which is soon prolonged into an incurable wound of conscience.

On the steps of the rostrum, as he descended them, John Gregory was met by a man of singular aspect, a man who has been encountered by us before, in the house of Senator Ingraham,—his son, Oliver.

As the two clergymen whom he had then addressed had been disturbed, and even dismayed, by this strange face and figure, the smooth, egglike face with its enormous forehead, narrow eyes, and wide, thin-lipped mouth, so now Gregory drew back instinctively, finding the singular apparition thus suddenly before him.

Mr. Oliver Ingraham did not appear to notice the movement, but, smiling his peculiarly complacent smile, held out one long, sinuous hand, and as Gregory took it, not over eagerly, he remarked in his high, feminine voice:—

“I liked your line very much, Mr. Gregory. Nothing would suit me better than to see these rich men brought to book. They’ll get their come-uppance in the next world, anyway; but I sometimes get tired of waiting. It would be a satisfaction to see Dives, Esquire, taking his torments here once in a while, don’t you think so?” and the malevolent leer with which the question was accompanied gave Gregory a chill of disgust.

Oliver held in his left hand a handsomely bound note-book and silver pencil-case which it was his custom to carry everywhere. Gregory, now about to pass on, and greet the crowds who were waiting to speak with him just below, was again stopped.

“Just a moment, Mr. Gregory,” said the other, slipping off the elastic, and opening the note-book with the dexterity of constant habit; “I want you to help me a little in gathering some very valuable statistics. It’s rather in your line, I take it. I have been engaged in this work for several years, and find it extremely interesting.”

Gregory noted the long, white, flexible fingers of the man, and the look, half of deficient intellect and half of cunning, in his face.

“Please make haste, Mr. Ingraham,” he said shortly, “there are others waiting.”

“I am making a computation,” Oliver continued imperturbably, “in fact, a carefully tabulated record, according to nations, of the probable number of souls from each nation now in Sheol—it is considered polite now to call it Sheol, I believe. We used to say hell when we were boys, didn’t we, Mr. Gregory?” and Oliver laughed his low, cruel laugh.

“Excuse me,” exclaimed Gregory, impatiently; “I could not give you any information on that subject. I have never been there. Allow me to pass on, if you please.”

Oliver closed his book as if not unaccustomed to rebuffs; but, as Gregory’s forward movement obliged him to retreat down the steps, he remarked slyly:—

“I had a message to you from the senator, if you only weren’t in such a hurry. He is one of the fellows that will have to go to now, weep and howl. He has the shekels, I can tell you! What he wants of you is more than I can figure out. I should suppose Ahab would as soon have sent for Elijah.”

“Did your father send for me?” asked Gregory, surprised. They were now at the foot of the steps, and the crowd was gathering about them.

“Yes; he would like to see you in his office on this same block, next building, as soon as you can get away from here. You work him right, and you can get something out of him for your Utopia.” The last words were called back aloud with a series of confidential nods, as Oliver turned and plunged into the crowd, who seemed to make a way for him with especial facility. Gregory saw him go with a keen sense of heat and discomfort.

Half an hour later, Gregory found himself in the office of Senator Ingraham, seated in a substantial office-chair by the well-appointed desk, while Mr. Ingraham, himself in evident and most unusual mental disturbance, walked up and down the room. Suddenly he wheeled, and confronted Gregory, as if with sudden, though difficult, resolution.

“Mr. Gregory,” he said, low, and with the stern, terse brevity of a man who finds himself forced to speak what he would rather leave unsaid, “for over thirty years I have carried certain facts in my personal history shut up in my own memory. Not one other being, to the best of my belief, has shared my knowledge. To-night, I cannot tell how, I do not know why, I feel that I must break silence, and before you—stranger as you are—unload my burden. A strange compulsion seems upon me to disclose the things I have hitherto lived to conceal. What there is in you or in what I have heard you say, to bring me to this point, I cannot understand; but I feel in you something which makes you alone, of all men I have ever met, the one to whom I can speaks—and must. Are you willing to hear me?”

John Gregory noted the set, hard lines in the lawyer’s face, the knotted cords in his hands, and the tone, half of defiance, half of self-abasement, with which he threw out this abrupt question. Accustomed to encounters with men in their innermost spiritual struggles, Gregory was in no way astonished or excited by this surprising beginning of their interview, and simply nodded gravely in token that Ingraham should proceed.

“I will not affront you by demanding secrecy on your part,” the latter began haughtily; “if it were possible for you to betray my confidence, it would have been impossible for me to give it to you. I understand men.”

He paused. Gregory made no remark in confirmation of this assertion, but the direct, unflinching look with which he met the appeal in the eyes of the speaker was full guarantee of good faith. There was promise of profound and sympathetic attention in Gregory’s look, there was also judicial calmness and reserve; in fine, the characteristics of the priest and the judge were singularly united in him, and it was to the perception of this fact that he owed the present interview.

“I do not know whether I am a respectable citizen or a murderer,” Ingraham now began, turning again to walk the floor, while an uncontrollable groan as of physical anguish accompanied this unexpected declaration. “Imagine, if you will, what thirty years have been inwardly with this uncertainty as food for thought, served to me by conscience, or some fiend, morning and night. If I could have forgotten for one blessed day, it has been ingeniously rendered impossible, for sin in bodily form is ever before me. You have seen my son.”

With this sentence, harsh and curt, Ingraham paused, glanced aside at Gregory, who assented, and then continued to walk and speak. His voice and manner alike showed that he was holding himself in control by the effort of all his will. Strange distorting lines appeared in his face, and there was heavy sweat on his forehead.

“I was twenty-five years old when I was married, and was alone in the world save for one brother,—Jim, we always called him,—two years younger than I. We had inherited a good name, strong physique, and some little property from our parents, and started in life shoulder to shoulder. In Burlington, where we first began business life together, we became intimately acquainted with a family in which there were two daughters. The elder, Cornelia, was very pretty and singularly attractive. Men always fell in love with her. I did, desperately. The younger sister was a commonplace, uninteresting girl, rather sentimental perhaps, not otherwise remarkable.

“I shall make this story as short as possible. I offered myself to Cornelia after long wooing, and was refused. I was bitterly wounded, angry, defiant. While I was in that state of mind, it became apparent to me that I was secretly an object of peculiar interest to the younger sister. Like many another fool, half in spite and half in heart-sickness, I sought her hand, and was at once accepted, and our marriage followed quickly. Within the year Cornelia and Jim became engaged. There was a hard, silent grudge against Jim in my heart from the day I first suspected that it was he who had stood between Cornelia and me, and their engagement increased the grudge to hate.

“We had, before this, put the whole of our inheritance into mining fields in what was then the far West, buying up a large tract of land, divided equally between us. The year after my marriage we moved West for a time, and I started out on a prospecting tour of our land; Jim to follow me when he had finished establishing a kind of business office in pioneer quarters, in a small town as near the base of our operations as was feasible. My wife remained in this town.

“On horseback, with two engineers and a copper expert and an Indian guide, I rode through our possessions. Miners were already at work, and had pursued the lead far enough to prove pretty distinctly that, while Jim’s part of the tract was likely to be fairly productive, the vein stopped short of mine, which was thus practically worthless.

“I rode back to our camp in a black mood. Jim, it seemed, was to succeed in everything; all that he sought was his, and for me there was nothing but failure and defeat. All the way back I brooded bitterly on the contrast between us, until I was in a still frenzy of jealousy when I reached the camp. The contrast between Cornelia, for whom I still had a wild, hopeless passion, and my wife, sickly, dull, indeed disagreeable to me already, was maddening, and had been sufficiently so before. But now, when I thought of Jim, with Cornelia for his wife and the certain prospect of large wealth to add to his elation, while I was without a penny or a prospect of any sort, the rage and fury in my mind became almost intoxicating.

“We had encountered hostile Indians on the trail as we returned, but our bold, dare-devil dash through this danger made slight impression on me. I think death would have been welcome to me that night. God knows I wish I had met it then. My heart was evil enough, but at least it had not the guilt that came later.

“I suppose, Mr. Gregory, that I am answerable for my brother’s death—not in the eye of the law, but before God. And yet—if you could tell me that I am mistaken, that I exaggerate, that other men would have done the same and held themselves guiltless—if that could be—” Ingraham broke off and fixed his eyes on Gregory’s face once more, as if in appeal for his life.

“Please go on,” was Gregory’s response, but the words were gently spoken, as the words of a physician when he is diagnosing a manifestly mortal disease.

“Very well,” said Ingraham, harshly. “Jim was at the camp, and was boy enough to parade a letter from Cornelia before me. We quarrelled fiercely, about what I cannot remember, but I could not restrain the storm of rage and jealousy in me. It had to break loose somewhere. I refused to tell Jim what I had discovered regarding the lead, and he declared he would go and find out for himself. I said he would be a fool if he did, but gave him no hint of the fact that there were hostile Indians on the way. He knew nothing of the conditions, nor the character of the people about us, having never been in the country before. It was early in the morning. We had ridden all night, and the men had gone to their tents and were sleeping off the effects of our struggle. I told Jim he could not get a guide. He merely whistled in a light-hearted, careless way he had, and started off to a neighbouring camp, in search, as I inferred, of some escort. I saw him no more, and made no attempt to govern his actions, and did not even know whether he had started. Who and what the guide was whom he obtained, I learned later.

“I slept most of that day, after Jim disappeared, exhausted in body and mind, and continued to sleep far into the night, keeping my tent door securely closed, as I wished to see and speak to no one. It was, perhaps, three o’clock of the morning following when I was roused by a strange noise at my tent door. Starting up from my bed on the ground, I saw that some one had cut open the fastenings, and that the flap was drawn back. In the opening thus formed stood the shape of an Indian rider on horseback, perfectly motionless. The moonlight, which was unusually brilliant, fell full upon the face of this man, and I recognized him at once, with a horrible chill of foreboding, as a half-witted Indian who sometimes acted as guide, but only to those who knew no better than to accept his services, which were worthless and treacherous. He was a half-breed, an odious, repulsive being, with only wit enough to be malicious, and of abnormal treachery and cruelty even for his kind. Never can I forget that face of his in the moonlight. He spoke not one word, but simply sat his horse and looked at me with his narrow, gleaming eyes, a malignant grin making his ugliness fairly fiendish. If you want to get a faint idea of his look, recall the face of Oliver—my son;” Ingraham’s voice sunk to a whisper, and he added, “I can never escape it.”

Gregory’s brows knit heavily, and his face reflected something of the tortured misery of the man before him.

“It was not,” said Ingraham, “until I had staggered to my feet that I saw that across his saddle-bow this creature carried a dead body—Jim. There was an Indian arrow in his side.”

“No matter, no matter for the rest; I understand,” said Gregory, hastily.

There was silence for a moment, and then Ingraham, with a strong effort, rallied himself to conclude his story.

“I was Jim’s heir.” These words were spoken with hard and scornful emphasis. “That was a feature of the case which presents complications to a man in forming a judgment. Perhaps you will believe me when I say that this issue had not entered my mind in letting the boy go to his death. Indeed, the whole series of events was without deliberation, but under the influence of blind, sullen anger.”

“I believe you,” said Gregory.

“All the same, I profited by his death. The mines proved immensely valuable, and are even to-day. They have made me rich—and incomparably wretched. A word or two more, and you will know the whole story. Jim was brought home, here, for burial, my wife and I returning with his body. All through that journey, and continually, for many months, I saw before me, waking or sleeping, that face of cruelty incarnate, the half-witted Indian guide, as I had seen him on that awful night. That face was my Nemesis. It is still.

“Within the year my wife gave birth to a son, Oliver,—a strange perversion, made up of moral obliquity, mental distortion, and physical deformity, like an embodiment of sin. On his face was stamped by some strange trick of nature the image which had haunted me—as if the Fates, or the Fiends, or God himself, had feared I might forget, and know a day of respite.

“My wife died when Oliver was a few months old,—died of cold, I believe, the chill of our loveless marriage. Two years later Cornelia and I were married. I believe she has been happy. I have been prospered, and have risen to a position of some influence, and we have all that could be desired in our home, in our three daughters. But when, to-night, I heard you pronounce the judgments of God on men who had built up prosperity upon a lie, I was like a man struck in his very heart. I felt that I could no longer endure my hidden load, and must confess to one human being my past, and make restitution, if by any means it is yet possible. The Romish Church is merciful, when it provides the possibility of confession to sinful men.

“What have you to say to me? Have you healing for such a sore as mine?”

With these abrupt words Ingraham threw himself into a leather-covered arm-chair with the action of complete exhaustion. His aspect was changed from that of the alert, confident man of the world and of affairs, to that of a broken down and shattered age.

Sin is not a monster to be mused on, but an impotence to be got rid of.

Use sin as it will use you; spare it not, for it will not spare you; it is your murderer and the murderer of the world: use it, therefore, as a murderer should be used. Kill it before it kills you; and though it kill your bodies, it shall not be able to kill your souls: and though it bring you to the grave, as it did your Head, it shall not be able to keep you there.—Baxter.

John Gregory met the demand thus made upon him with all the moral and spiritual resources of which he was master, for all were needed. The full strength of the man’s personality was brought into action, the lofty severity, the unflinching hate of sin, and yet the clear vision which could see beyond the torture and taint of it, and sound the depth of a nature which thus agonized for redemption and for righteousness.

“The only sin,” he said, in the words of another, “which is unforgiven is the sin which is unrepented of. That early yielding to a paroxysm of jealousy and rage had a fearful, and yet it may even be a merciful, result. There are those who have given way to worse, and, no result following, have lived on in hardness of heart and contempt of God’s law. Christ’s inflexible law, far more rigorous than the old law of Moses, says he that hateth his brother is a murderer. Murder, then, is the commonest of social sins, rather than the rarest. Christ also says that it was for sinners that he came to die, not for the righteous. His love overflows all our sin, and finds no halt at the degrees of guilt which men emphasize in their shallow judgment. Men judge by consequences, by outward events; God looks upon the heart.

“Looking upon the heart, as far as we may, with God, I say then, you have been guilty of murder, but so have other men. Many a man has cherished a spirit of bitter revenge and hatred against one who had injured him, who has not suffered what you have, not having caused or profited by the death of that person, directly or indirectly; but before God you are perhaps equally guilty.

“I do not count your sin slight. I would not seek to make it small in your own eyes, but I believe that you are released from the guilt and burden borne so long, and should no longer stagger under it. Has not Almighty God given to his servants power and commandment to declare to those who are penitent the absolution and remission of their sins?

“What did our Lord say to the leper who sought his cleansing? ‘I will, be thou clean.’ Even this he says to you. Throw off that old yoke of bondage. It is your right. Go free in the liberty of the sons of God, but go to sin no more.”

These words, spoken with the authority of a priest, and with the solemnity of absolute conviction, brought something of light and release to the troubled heart of Ingraham.

The hour was late, indeed, morning was at hand, when, lifting his face upon which a certain calmness had settled, he said to Gregory, earnestly:—

“I believe I grasp the truth of what you say, and that there is for me a certain peace, a partial release, although forgetfulness never. But this is not enough; the cry of my whole soul is to make restitution in some sort, somewhere, although how and to whom I cannot see. I still have the stain that I profit by my sin. What can you tell me? Do you see a way for me?”

John Gregory looked at Ingraham steadily for a moment before speaking, and then said very slowly:—

“Do you remember what the Master said to a certain ruler, ‘Sell all that thou hast, and distribute unto the poor, and come, follow me’? If you are in earnest, Mr. Ingraham, and if you feel that, as your experience of sin has been in no light and common form, but in a depth of agony which few men ever know, so your repentance should be along no mild and easy lines, but should reach to the foundations of your life—if, I say, you see things thus, and can bear so strong a prescription, I should repeat to you literally what Christ said to the rich ruler. It is a hard saying; not every man can receive it.”

The two men faced each other in silence for a moment, and Gregory saw the leap of a sudden question in the other’s eyes.

“No,” he said sternly, as if in answer to a spoken inquiry, “I am not advising you with an eye on my own advantage. My thought was not of my own cause, but of the cause of humanity anywhere. Pardon me if I speak plainly; I could not use a farthing of your money, were it all at my disposal, for building up the work I am seeking to establish in Fraternia. Recall what you heard me say to-night of the true Kingdom of God. I could not use your money, Mr. Ingraham, in seeking to show forth that kingdom; but I could use you, should you wish to come with us, if you came empty-handed.”

The lawyer felt the pitiless severity of Gregory’s moral standard and all that this dictum implied, but he did not resist it. His humiliation and submission were sincere, and, for the time at least, controlling; but doubt and conflict were plainly read in his face.

“Is it a hard saying?” John Gregory asked, with a slight smile.

“Yes, harder than you know. I could do what you say, were I alone to be considered; but to reduce my family to beggary, to cut short my career and stain my reputation by the cloud which would inevitably rest upon it in the community by such an unheard-of course of action, to take my wife and daughters from their social world to follow me, sent like a scapegoat into some wilderness—really, Mr. Gregory, what you name is beyond reason!”

Gregory made absolutely no response. After a long silence, Ingraham said thoughtfully:—

“This is about the way I see for myself: from this time on I shall seek to live a humbler and a sincerely Christian life, and shall strive in every way open to me to aid and further the cause of righteousness, with my money and with my influence. In this way I shall bring happiness and satisfaction to my wife, to whom I owe the highest obligation, next to God, instead of destroying her comfort by dragging her with me into some late missionary endeavour or eccentric experiment. Pardon me, Mr. Gregory, if I too speak plainly.

“But this is not all. Although I feel no individual call in the direction of your coÖperative colony, and am not over sanguine of its success, I do believe profoundly in you, personally, as I must have shown you. Now I want you to reconsider what you said a little while ago. Frankly, this discriminating between money made in one way or another savours to me of superstition. This money, which is mine, cannot be destroyed; even you would hardly advise that. Why not put it to a good use, the best possible from your point of view? I have never given away money largely, but I am able to, and I want to seal our interview to-night with a substantial gift.”

As he spoke, Ingraham turned to his desk and touched a check-book which lay upon it.

“Mr. Gregory, I want to write my check for fifty thousand dollars to be placed unconditionally in your hands. You want a little church down there in your settlement, and you want it beautiful, worthy of its purpose; you want a library—both are necessary to carry on the kind of work you project. Here they are,” and again he touched the little leather book with his forefinger; “let me do that much as a memorial of this night and what you have done for me.”

John Gregory met the look of sincere and even anxious appeal with which these words were spoken with unyielding, although not unkindly, firmness.

“This is a generous impulse on your part, Mr. Ingraham. Do not for a moment think I fail to appreciate it. You are right; the money must be used, and will be, I hope, promptly and wisely. You must pardon me a certain over nicety perhaps in preferring not to build my church in Fraternia, or even my library, with it. You will find plenty of men less fastidious, and no one but myself will, I suppose, have reason to entertain such scruples.”

Gregory had risen, and was ready now to go. It was four o’clock, he found, by his watch, and it had been a long vigil; but, while Ingraham’s face was haggard and even ghastly, that of Gregory was unchanged in its massive firmness and its strong, fine lines.

Ingraham stood at his desk plainly chagrined and ill at ease.

“In your eyes, I see,” he said ruefully, “I am still in the place of the man who went away sorrowful because he had great possessions.”

“Perhaps,” said Gregory; “it is too soon to tell.”

“Every man must judge for himself, Mr. Gregory, when it comes to the supreme acts of his life.”

“Yes,” said the other, sadly; “to the supreme acts or to the supreme compromises. Will you excuse me now? I believe that I must go.” Gregory held out his hand, which Ingraham grasped with eagerness. “You have honoured me by your confidence and your generosity. Count me your friend if you will. Good night.”

Gertrude Ingraham was still unmarried, still pretty, still charming in her dainty, high-bred way.

Perhaps the thought crossed Keith Burgess’s mind as he joined her in her father’s library that evening, after their return from Gregory’s lecture, that she would have been, as a wife, a shade less exigeante than Anna.

Anna, shrinking from the small coin of discussion of so great themes, had gone directly to their room,—the room which had been Keith’s on his first visit to Burlington. Keith remained in the library to accept the refreshment which Gertrude had prepared for their return, and found the situation altogether pleasing. It was a rest to a sensitive, nervous man like himself to sit down with a pretty woman who had no startling theories of life and conduct; one who had always moved, and who would always choose to move, on the comfortable lines of convention, instead of seeking some other path for herself, rough and lonely.

Perhaps Keith lingered all the more willingly to-night because he perceived a rough and lonely path opening visibly before him, into which he must in all probability turn full soon.

“What did you think of Mr. Gregory?” asked Gertrude Ingraham over her tea-cups.

“He is a tremendous speaker,” said Keith, soberly; “I never heard a man who could mould an audience to his will as he does. You were not there to-night.”

“No, but I heard him before you and Mrs. Burgess came, night before last. I think he has the finest physique of any orator I ever heard. Don’t you think that is one source of his power? There is something absolutely majestic about him when he is speaking. He seems to overpower you—you must agree with him, whether you do or not.”

“Then do you accept this new doctrine of his, Miss Ingraham?”

“You mean that there should be no social distinctions, no aristocratic and privileged class, no wealth and no poverty, and all that? I do not know what he said to-night, you see, but that is the line on which he has been speaking.”

“Yes, that is what it all comes to.”

“Why, no, of course I don’t believe in it, when I get away from Mr. Gregory,” said Gertrude, laughing prettily; “because I really think he is going against the fundamental laws of God. There have always been rich people and poor people, and it was intended that there always should be, I think.”

“It does seem absolutely impracticable to carry out any such theory in actual life. Certainly it would be under existing conditions. It can only be done by radical, by revolutionary methods. Have you heard what Mr. Gregory is actually doing to illustrate his theory? Have you heard of Fraternia?”

Gertrude Ingraham lifted her chin with a roguish little movement and nodded with a charming smile.

“Yes, I have heard of Fraternia too! Isn’t it droll? That is why I didn’t go to-night, you see. I was afraid Mr. Gregory would get hold of me with that irresistible power of his, and then I should have to go and work in a cotton mill!” and with this Gertrude lifted her eyebrows with an expression of plaintive self-pity which Keith found very taking. “I’m afraid I shouldn’t like it,” she added archly; “it would be so new, and one’s hands would get so horrid!”

They laughed together, Keith naturally noting the delicacy of the small white hands which were manipulating the transparent china on the low table between them. Then Mrs. Ingraham and others coming into the room after them, Keith rose with graceful courtesy to serve them and to draw them into the conversation. But all the while Keith had a sense that he was turning against himself the sharpest weapons which could have been found, nothing being so instinctively dreaded by him as to put himself in an absurd situation, to awaken ridicule, even his own.

Just below the surface of his thought there lay two formidable facts, like sunk, threatening rocks seen darkly under smooth water. He knew that Anna would propose to him that they should throw themselves into Gregory’s enterprise, and become disciples of the new school; and he knew that having cut off hitherto, involuntarily or otherwise, each deepest desire of her soul for the service of others, he should not dare to thwart her in this. If she wished to do this thing, he must join her in it.

Keith had himself been deeply moved by Gregory. The old passion for sacrifice and self-devotion had stirred again within him. He felt the high courage, the generosity, the strong initiative of Gregory; he was thrilled at the sight of a man who could throw himself unreservedly into a difficult and dangerous crusade, simply for an ideal, with all to lose and nothing to gain. He too had once marched to that same music; his blood was stirred, and he felt something of the enthusiasm of his student years, rising warm within him. He perfectly understood the motions of Anna’s spirit, and shared in them, up to a certain point. This point was reached when he touched the limit set by his inborn and inherited conservatism, his constitutional preference for things as they were, and his quick dread of making himself absurd. And now, Gertrude Ingraham with her pretty mocking had suddenly put the whole thing before him in the light he dreaded most.

Anna was not thus divided in her mind, and could not have been. Something of the steadfast simplicity of her ancient German ancestry preserved her from this characteristically American form of sensitiveness. She could have adopted without hesitation, any outward forms, however out of conformity to usage, however grotesque in the eyes of others, if she had felt the inward call. Gregory’s stern and lofty utterances had come to her with full prophetic weight, and had left nothing in her to rise up in doubt or gainsaying.

In this mood Keith found her. She was standing, still fully dressed, before the chimney-piece, where he had sat one night and dreamed at once of her and Gertrude Ingraham. Her hands were clasped and hanging before her; her face was slightly pale, and her eyes strangely large and luminous. Standing before her, Keith took her clasped hands between his, and looked at her with a questioning smile.

“Well, dear,” he said, “what is it?”

“You know,” she answered softly. “Was it not to you what it was to me? Is it not the very chance we wish, to redeem our poor lost hopes of service?—to leave all the luxuries and privileges and advantages, and share the world’s sorrows? to become poor and humble as our Master was? to give what we have received? Oh, Keith, is it to be, or must another hope go by?”

As Anna thus cried out, the solemn appeal of her nature, austere, and yet full-charged with noble passion, breaking at last through the barriers which had long held it back, gave her an extraordinary spiritual grandeur. There was something of awe in the look with which her husband regarded her. Weapons of fear and doubt and cavil fell before that celestial sternness in her eyes,—a look we see sometimes in the innocent eyes of young children.

“It is to be, Anna. You shall have your way this time, my wife.”

The words were spoken reverently, with grave gentleness, and Keith’s own sweet courtesy. Was it Anna’s fault that she failed, in the exaltation of her mood, to catch the sadness in them?

Keith was hardly conscious of it himself. He was thinking, on an unspoken parallel, that he would rather be privileged to adore Anna Mallison in a moment like this, even though she led him in a rough and lonely path, than to dally with another woman in smoothness and ease.

We all have need of that prayer of the Breton mariner, “Save us, O God! Thine ocean is so large and our little boats are so small.”—Farrar.

“Trunks checked for Utopia! Direct passenger route without change of cars! Ye gods, it doth amaze me!”

Thus Professor Ward, with a sardonic and yet discomfited smile, standing in the studio of his friend Pierce Everett, in Fulham. The room was in the disorder of a radical breaking up; packing boxes standing about and litter strewn everywhere.

Everett in his shirt sleeves was piling on a table a mass of draperies which he had taken from the wall. He was covered with dust, but his face was full of joyous excitement.

“Yes, my good friend—straight for Utopia now!

Everett trolled out the old negro chorus with hilarious enjoyment.

“Quos Deus vult perdere—” began Ward, grimly.

“Oh, we’re all mad, you know. We are simply not so mad as the rest of you,” interrupted Everett, gayly. “We have intervals of sanity, and are taking advantage of one of them to get out of the mad-house, leaving you other fellows to keep up your unprofitable strife with phantoms by yourselves, while we actually—yes, we even dare to believe it—live. Think of that, Ward, if you have the imagination!” Ward shook his head. “No, you haven’t; that is so. If you had, you could not have listened to Gregory unmoved.”

“Confound Gregory,” muttered Ward. “What did you ever get the man here for, turning our world upside down!”

“That has been the occupation of seers and prophets from the beginning, I believe,” retorted Everett, carelessly.

“Seers and prophets!” cried Ward, angrily, “that is what I can stand least of all. This posing as a kind of nineteenth century John the Baptist strikes me as exquisitely ridiculous.”

Everett’s eyes flashed dangerously, but he made no rejoinder.

“I saw your John the Baptist this morning in the Central Station buying his railway ticket and morning paper like any other average man. The locusts and wild honey were not in evidence.”

“No, he doesn’t take nourishment habitually in railway stations,” put in Everett, coolly.

“I didn’t see any leathern girdle about his loins, either, although of course he may wear it next the skin for penitential purposes. His clothing appeared to be a species of camel’s hair—”

“Falsely so called,” put in Everett; “it is really English tweed. Very good quality.”

“Yes, I’ll venture to say that is true. Your prophet of the wilderness strikes me as knowing a good thing when he sees it. Plague take the fellow! He has just that sort of brute force and sheer overbearing personal dominance, which you idealists and credulous take for spiritual authority.”

“Come now, Ward, we may as well keep our tempers and treat this matter decently. Nothing is gained by calling names. You are naturally prejudiced against a man who attacks the existing social order, and suggests that even the rulers of the synagogue and the great teachers of the schools have something yet to learn. Gregory is radical, revolutionary perhaps, but not a whit more so than the New Testament makes him. He is an absolutely conscientious man; he has given up every personal ambition, wealth, position, all that most men cling to—”

“In order to become a Dictator, in a field where there is very little competition.”

Everett suppressed the irritation which this interposition aroused, and continued in a lighter tone,—

“You are enough of a dictator yourself to see this point, which had escaped the rest of us. I can see that it is a little bitter to you to have Mrs. Burgess seeking another spiritual and intellectual adviser,—going after other gods, as it were.”

“Yes,” said Ward, gravely; “it makes me sick at heart to see a woman like Mrs. Burgess, with all that glorious power of self-devotion of hers, throwing herself blindly into this wild, Quixotic experiment—sure to end in disappointment and defeat. It is mournful, most mournful,” and Ward shook his head in melancholy fashion. “And when it comes to Keith,” he resumed, “alas! our brother! Poor Keith, with his lifelong habits of luxurious ease, his conventional views of duty, his yardstick imagination, and his wretched health—to think of such a man being torn from all the amenities of a refined Christian home, and carted across lots, Government bonds and all, to be set down in some malarial swamp to dig ditches with a set of ploughmen, to prove, forsooth! that all men are created free and equal,” and Ward groaned and bent his head as if overcome by the picture he had called up.

Lifting his head suddenly, he added in a tone of pensive rumination.

“He is one of those men Thoreau tells of, who would not go a-huckleberrying without a medicine chest; and he would perish, I am convinced, if deprived of improved sanitary plumbing.”

“All very clever,” said Everett, “but I will take the liberty of mentioning the fact that the Burgess’s physician hails the North Carolina project as the very best thing which could happen for Keith’s health.”

Hardly had he finished the sentence when a light knock was heard on the half-open door of the studio, and Anna Burgess, at Everett’s word, stepped into the room.

She wore a thin black gown, for the day was warm, and a broad-brimmed hat of some transparent black substance threw the fine shape of her head and the pure tints of her face into striking relief. A handful of white jonquils was fastened into the front of her gown, and the freshness of the June day seemed to enter the dusty, despoiled studio with her.

Both men stood at gaze before her with deference and admiration in every line and look. With a delicate flush rising in her cheeks, Anna gave her hand to each, and spoke a word of greeting in which her natural shyness and her acquired social grace were mingled to a manner of peculiar charm.

“I ran up to hand you these papers for Mr. Gregory,” she said to Everett, a vibration of suppressed joy in her full, low voice which he had never heard before. “You know he said he would like it if you would bring them,” and she placed a long envelope in his hand. “No, I cannot stop a moment, Keith is waiting for me in the carriage. I did not give the papers to the maid because I wanted to say to you, Mr. Everett, that Keith does not see it any differently,—about the estate, you know. He pledges the income, freely, altogether, but he feels that the estate itself should be kept intact.”

“Thank Heaven, he has a spark of reason left!” exclaimed Ward under his breath, adding quickly,—

“Pardon me, Mrs. Burgess, but you know I am not a Gregorian psalm myself, yet.”

Anna turned to him with her rare smile, less brilliant than clear and luminous.

“But I was so glad you came to the house, Professor Ward, and heard Mr. Gregory,” she said with gracious courtesy; “we cannot expect every one to follow out these new theories practically as we hope to do, but at least we want every one we care about to know really what they are.”

“Do you think that many of those present at your house that afternoon were inclined to accept Mr. Gregory’s gospel, if I may so call it?” asked Ward, respectfully.

“Of course not,” interjected Everett, “there was no one there but cranks and critics.”

Anna’s face clouded a little. “No,” she said simply. “Fulham is not a good field for such a message; it was quite different in Burlington. Most of them went away saying it would be very fine if it were not wholly impossible.”

“And it does not occur to you, does it, Mrs. Burgess,” Ward pressed the question with undisguised earnestness, “that perhaps they were right? that there is something to be said for the old order, as old as the race? that possibly certain distinctions are inherent in the nature of things? Such distinctions, for instance, as separate you,” and Ward gave the pronoun a freight of significance to carry, “from that man,” and he indicated a labourer who had just left the room with an immense box of merchandise on his broad, bent shoulders, and whose slow, heavy steps could now be heard on the stairs below.

He had struck the wrong chord.

“Professor Ward,” cried Anna, her voice even lower than its wont, but her emphasis the more intense, “did that man choose to be reduced to the life and little more than the faculties of a beast of burden, to be a brother to the ox, to live a blind, brutalized, animal existence, with neither joy nor star?”

She paused a moment, and then added, with indescribable pathos dimming the kindling light in her eyes:—

“It is that man, Professor Ward, and what he stands for, that sends me to Fraternia, if perhaps I can yet atone. It is I that have made that man what he is, and you, and all of us who have clung gladly to our powers and privileges, and dared to believe that we were made for the heights of life, and men like him for the abyss. If we could read our New Testament once as if it were not an old story! If we, for one moment, could lay our social cruelties beside that pattern shown us in the mount!”

The deep heart of her and the innermost motive power broke forth from Anna’s usual quiet and reserve in these last words with thrilling influence upon both men. She was beautiful as she spoke, but with the beauty of some Miriam or Cassandra,—a woman, as had been said of her long before, “to die for, not to play games with.”

Professor Ward, the irritation of his earlier mood quite gone, stood regarding Anna as she spoke with a sadness as profound as it was wholly unaffected. Having spoken, she turned to go.

“Let me say one word, Mrs. Burgess,” he said, extending his hand to detain her a moment. “I sympathize deeply with your purposes, and I am not wholly incapable of appreciating your motives. From my heart I shall bid you God-speed on your way when your time comes to go out into this new spiritual adventure. It will be none the less noble because it is impossible.”

“Good-by,” she said, and smiled.

A valley, two thousand feet above the sea level, narrowing at its upper or northern end to a ravine piercing thickly wooded hills, but widening gradually southward, until, a mile lower down the mountain stream which issues from the gorge, it becomes a broad sunny meadow land.

On a day in the middle of March, when the sun shone warm and a turquoise sky arched smiling over this valley, signs of human activity and energy prevailed on every side. In the bottom lands men were ploughing the broad level fields; here the river had been dammed, forming a pond, on the bank of which stood a large picturesque building sheathed with dark-green shingles. From the wide and open windows of this building the sound of whirring spindles and the joyous laughter of girls and men issued.

Higher up the valley men were at work building a light bridge of plank across the creek, while others were carting newly sawed lumber, with its strong pungent smell, from the sawmill below. On the eastern side of the valley, between this bridge and the mills half a mile south, were scattered or grouped at irregular intervals, forty or fifty small cabins, some of log, others of unplaned boards; thatched, or covered in red tile. Men and women were at work in the damp mould of the gardens by which these cabins were surrounded, and fresh green things were shooting up. On the opposite side of the stream, on a wooded knoll, stood a large, low, barrack-like building with a red roof, and near it a few cabins. It was opposite this group of buildings that the foot-bridge was in process of making, to supersede a single plank and rail which had hitherto connected the banks of the stream. Down the valley from this small and separate settlement stretched fields already under cultivation, for corn, potatoes, and cotton.

There were no streets in this rustic settlement. Footpaths led to the cottage doors through the thin, coarse grass, and along the eastern side of the little river; and between its bank and the houses ran a rough wagon road, deeply rutted now by the wheels of the lumber wagons in the soft, red soil. To the north and east the hills rose abruptly, covered with oak and pine, and the aromatic fragrance of the latter was in the air, mingling with the scent of the soil. Beyond the lower hills to the west loomed the shoulders of dim, blue mountains, while looking south, down the shining river, beyond a belt of woodland, the valley broadened out to the sunny plain stretching to the horizon line.

The limpid clearness of the air, the fragrance of the forest and the earth, the musical flow of the little river, the wonderful brilliancy of the sky, with the vast uplift of the mountains, gave a sense of wild perfection to the ensemble. Such was Fraternia in the morning of its second spring.

It was during that decade which saw the sudden springing into life of so large a number of communistic organizations and settlements throughout the country, mainly in the south and west. Many of these experiments were crude and obscure; most of them were shortlived. They were founded on widely different social conceptions, ranging from those of unlimited license and rank anarchism up to the high ideals of the life of Christian brotherhood set forth in the early church.

The latter was the foundation of John Gregory’s colony in Fraternia. Inflexible morality and blamelessness of Christian living were his cardinal laws. Built upon them was the superstructure of economic and social equality, of labour sharing, and of domestic simplicity.

Thus far unusual promise attended the adventure, and peace and good will reigned in the little community.

Toward the upper end of the village half a dozen men were at work around a circular excavation not more than five or six feet in diameter, which had been lined with irregular slabs and blocks of stone patched together with clay. In blue overalls thickly bespattered with red mud and the sticky clay, a man was working on his knees at the edge of this basin. It was Keith Burgess. Near him, measuring with rule and line and marking out the width of the coping, stood the artist, Pierce Everett. Their fellow-workmen were two Irishmen—big, active fellows, with honest eyes—and a wiry little black-a-vised Jew, a quondam foreman in a New York sweat-shop. He was mixing clay and laying the stone of the coping, while the Irishmen were at work in an open trench through which ran the pipe which was to conduct the water from a spring in the ravine above into the new reservoir.

Emerging from the woods below the dam a little crowd of children came straying up the valley, laughing and shouting, and jumping gayly over the pools of red mud in the road. Their hands were full of wild flowers,—bloodroot, and anemones, and arbutus; their hair was blown about in the wind; their eyes were shining. Among them, giving her hand to a little girl who walked with a crutch, walked Anna Burgess, her face as joyous as theirs, and a free, unhampered vigour and grace in every line of her figure. She was the head teacher in the village school, and was known to her scholars, and, indeed, quite generally in the little community, as “Sister Benigna.”

This name, “Benigna,” which had come down in Anna’s family for generations, and had been given her as a second name, had not been used for many years, save by her mother, who still clung loyally to the full “Anna Benigna.” Who it was in Fraternia who had revived the beautiful old Moravian name was not known, but the use of it had been quickly established, especially among the children and the foreign folk.

The habit of using “Brother” and “Sister” with the given name in ordinary social intercourse was common, although not universal, in Fraternia. Anna’s assistants in the school—a pale, little English governess, who had apparently never known stronger food than tea and bread until she came to Fraternia, and a rosy-cheeked German kindergartner—were among the little flock, their hands overflowing with wild flowers, and their faces with the high delight the spring day brought them. It was Saturday morning, and a holiday.

Suddenly there was a shout from some boys who were foremost in the company, and they came scampering back to Anna exclaiming that the “fountain” was almost finished, and, perhaps, the water would soon be turned into it. By common consent the whole party hastened on and soon encircled the workmen at the basin with noisy questions and merry chatter. It was to be so fine not to have to go up to the spring in the ravine with pails and pitchers any more. Could they surely have the water here for Sunday? Then FrÄulein Frieda told them how the girls in her country came to such fountains with their jugs, and carried them away full on their heads. She showed them with a tin pail, found lying in the clay, just how it was done, walking away with firm, balanced step, the pail unsupported on her pretty flaxen-haired head, on which the sun shone dazzlingly. The little girls were greatly delighted, and all declared they should learn to carry their water pots home on their heads from the Quelle, as FrÄulein Frieda called it.

Anna stood at the edge of the basin, Keith at her feet, on his knees, with the trowel in his hands, smiling up at her, the little lame girl still at her side, a trace of wistfulness in her eyes as she watched the others.

“We will not carry our water pails on our heads, you and I, will we, little Judith?” Anna asked, kind and motherly. “We want our brains to grow, and it might crowd them down; don’t you think so?”

The swarthy Jew looked up from the clay he was mixing with quick, instinctive gratitude. Judith was his child. He grinned a broad and rather hideous grin, and exclaimed in a broken dialect:—

“Das ist so, Kleine; shust listen to our lady! She knows. She says it right.”

Pierce Everett’s dark eyes flashed with sudden enthusiasm. Turning to Anna he bowed profoundly and said low to Keith, as well as to her:—

“There you have it! Barnabas has found your title—‘our lady’!”

Anna looked into Everett’s dark eager eyes with her quiet smile, and was about to speak, when a sudden noise of grating and rattling and horses’ hoofs behind them caused them all three to turn and look down the river. A horse and stone drag were approaching rapidly, driven by John Gregory, who stood on the drag, which was loaded with big clean pebbles from the river-bed. He wore a coarse grey flannel shirt, the collar turned off a little at the throat, and rough grey trousers tucked into high rubber boots, which reached to the thighs. The cloth cap on his head with its vizor bore a certain resemblance to a helmet, and altogether the likeness of the whole appearance to that of a Roman warrior in his chariot did not escape the three friends who watched its approach in the motley crowd around the basin.

Gregory drove his drag close up to the edge of the coping, now nearly laid, greeted the company with a courteous removal of his hat and a cordial Good-morning, then discharged the load of pebbles in a glinting heap on the soft red earth.

There was no conscious assumption of mastery or direction in Gregory’s manner, nothing could have been simpler or more democratic than the impartial comradery with which he joined the others, nevertheless the sense that the master was among them was instantly communicated throughout the little group. Up in the trench, nearly to the base of the cliffs which marked the entrance to the ravine, one Irishman said to the other, in a tone of satisfaction not unmixed with good-natured sarcasm:—

“Himsilf’s come now. The gintlemin masons will git to rights or they’ll lose their job, d’ye mind, Patrick?”

“Oh, ay,” said the other, “an’ the same to yersilf, if ye ivir noticed it.”

There was a little silence even among the chattering children as Gregory stooped by Everett’s side, pulled up with the ease of mighty muscle two or three stones, took the trowel from Keith’s hand and a hod of mortar from the waiting Barnabas, and set the stones over on a truer line, laughing the while with the men and turning aside the edge of criticism with frank self-disparagement, as being himself but a tyro.

A curious consequence of Gregory’s appearance on the scene after this sort, was the dwarfed effect of the men around him, who suddenly seemed to have shrunk in stature and proportions, and whose motions, beside the virile force and confident freedom of his, appeared incompetent and weak.

Anna had drawn back from her place near the basin’s edge. Gregory had not looked at her nor she at him directly. In fact, they habitually, for some reason they themselves could not define, avoided each other, and yet could not avoid a piercing consciousness, when together, of every look and word of the other. A sudden shyness and subduing had fallen instantly upon Anna’s bright mood, and, while the others watched every look and motion of Gregory with almost breathless interest, she stood apart and arranged little Judith’s flowers with apparent preoccupation.

Tossing the trowel back to Keith, with whom he exchanged a few words of question, Gregory next hastened with long strides up the line of the trench to the place where the Irishmen were at work. Here was a primitive moss-grown trough, into which the water of the spring had hitherto been conducted, and to which all the people had been obliged to come for their supply of drinking water. The new iron pipe already replaced the rude wooden conduit which had done duty until now, but the water still flowed into the trough, and would do so until, the basin completed, the connection might be made between the two sections of pipe.

Under Gregory’s direction this was now effected, and the water of the spring, if there was no flaw, should now flow unimpeded into the basin below. To test the basin, it was Gregory’s purpose to make the experiment at once.

Presently there was a shout, exulting and joyous, from the company below.

“The water is here! The water! The water!” rose the cry into the stillness of the valley. The men at work upon the bridge left their work, and hastened to join the little crowd.

With strides even longer than before, Gregory came down again, the Irishmen following him in a scramble to keep up. Joy was in all their faces, and the deepest joy of all in that of Gregory. They stood together and watched the jet of water as it sprang from the mouth of the pipe, turbid at first, but gradually becoming clear and sparkling, and fell with a gentle, musical plashing into the stone fountain. There was complete silence for a little space, as they looked intently at the increasing depth of the gathering pool, and then, bringing down his hands with a will on the shoulders of Keith and Everett, Gregory exclaimed:—

“Men, you have done well, all of you! It holds, do you see? It is tight as a ship. Hurrah!”

They all joined in a great cheer, and then, swiftly finding where she stood, or knowing, as he always seemed to know, instinctively, Gregory’s eyes sought Anna Burgess.

“Will Sister Benigna come up here?” he asked quietly, with the unhesitating steadiness of the man who knows just what he means to do.

Anna came slowly forward, and stood on the new-laid coping, by the side of Gregory, greatly wondering. Just beyond her was Keith, side by side with Barnabas Rosenblatt. Meanwhile, Gregory had taken from his pocket a small folding drinking cup of shining metal, which he had held in the flow of the spring water until it was thoroughly purified. Turning now to look at all those who stood round about, he said:—

“Brothers, sisters, little children, this water is the good gift of God. Let this fountain be now consecrated to all pure and holy uses. By the wish which I believe to be in every one of you, let the first who shall drink of this living water from the new fountain be our Sister Benigna.”

With these words Gregory filled the cup from the sparkling outgush of the spring, the water so cold that the polished cup was covered with frosty dimness, and with simple seriousness handed it to Anna. Affection and reverence were in the eyes of all the people as they watched her while with uncovered head, calm brow, and the fine simplicity of unconsciousness she took the cup and drank. But with the first touch of her lips to the cup the hand in which she held it trembled; and when she drained the last drop, it trembled still. As Anna stepped back, having drunk, into the ranks, Gregory lifted his hand, and with the gesture which commands devotion repeated the ancient words,—

“‘O most high, almighty, good Lord God, to thee belong praise, glory, honour, and all blessing!

“‘Praised be my Lord for our brother the wind, and for air and cloud, calms and all weather, by the which thou upholdest in life all creatures.

“‘Praised be my Lord for our sister, water, who is very serviceable unto us, and humble, and precious, and clear.’”

Then with a deeper solemnity and significance in face and voice, he continued:—

“‘If thou knewest the gift of God and who it is that saith to thee, Give me to drink; thou wouldest have asked of him and he would have given thee living water.’

“‘Jesus said, If any man thirst, let him come to me and drink.’”

It was noon, and turning they all dispersed, each to his own place, a deepened gladness in their faces. But as for Anna Burgess, a dimness was upon her joy, a thrilling undercurrent of dread and wonder which she could not understand; for she had drunk of the Cup of Trembling—and knew it not.

The Burgesses had come to Fraternia in the preceding December, although Keith had soon left again, having still many business concerns to recall him to Fulham. The house there was now closed, and the life there for them presumably ended, and, late in February, Keith had returned to Fraternia.

Anna had employed the months between their decision to join the coÖperative colony and their actual journey to the South, in taking a short course in nursing in a Fulham hospital, reviving her old knowledge of the subject, gained in her girlhood in Burlington. She had it in mind to fit herself thus as thoroughly as the brief interval allowed, for the duties of a trained nurse to the little community, this being an occupation at once congenial to herself and important for the general good. For uniformity of service was by no means according to John Gregory’s plan, and Gertrude Ingraham might not have found herself shut up to the cotton mill even if she had done so incredible a thing as to throw in her fortunes with Fraternia. All must labour, and all must labour for the general good,—one of Gregory’s prime maxims being, If a man will not work, neither shall he eat; but as far as practicable that labour was to be on the line of each person’s best capacity, choice, and development. Thus Keith Burgess’s feat of stonelaying had not been enforced, but self-chosen, as an expression of his good will in the sharing the coarser labours of the people. The work to which he had been assigned by Gregory was clerical, not manual, being that of secretary to the colony.

Anna, thus far, had had no opportunity for any especial use of her vocation as nurse, the families of Fraternia being remarkably healthy under the simple and wholesome conditions of their life, and serious illness unknown during that winter. Her trained and well-equipped mind obviously fitted her for a work of intellectual rather than industrial character, and the duties of teaching the children of the colony five hours a day—the required time of service for the women—were given to her by common consent.

Neither at the time when she was chosen to this service, nor at any other, had John Gregory directly communicated his wishes to Anna or discussed his plans with her; and yet, from the day of her arrival in Fraternia he had perhaps never formed a plan which was not in some subtle manner shaped by unconscious reference to her. In her own way, Anna’s personality was hardly less conspicuous than his; and these two invisibly and involuntarily modified each the other’s action and deliberation as the orbits of two stars are influenced by their mutual attraction and repulsion.

By the whole habit and choice of his life John Gregory was a purist in morals and in his personal practice of simplicity. The most frugal fare and the simplest domestic appliances served his turn by preference, although he had been born and bred in comparative luxury. He was free and fraternal with men; gently respectful to women, whom he yet never treated as if they were superior to men by force of their weakness, but rather as being on a basis of accepted equality; while to little children he always showed winning tenderness. Socially, however, he scrupulously avoided intercourse with women, with a curious, undeviating persistency which almost suggested ascetic withdrawal. The other men of the colony, several of whom were men of some social rank and mental culture, found it pleasant to stop on the woodland paths or by the stream, all the more in these soft spring days, and exchange thought and word, light or grave, with the girls and women, but never once had Gregory been seen to do this, or to visit the households presided over by women on any errand whatever. Whether a line of action which thus inevitably separated him more and more from the domestic life of the people, was pursued by deliberate purpose or by the accident of personal inclination was not clear, but certain it was that the fact contributed to the distinction and separation which seemed inevitably to belong to Gregory. With all his simplicity of life and democratic brotherliness of conversation, he lived and moved in Fraternia with an effect of one on a wholly different plane from the others, and with the full practical exercise of a dictatorship which no one resented because all regarded him with a species of hero-worship as manifestly the master of the situation.

His residence was in one of the small cabins on the western side of the river, to which the bridge gave convenient access. The other cabins served, one as a rude, temporary library, the other as storehouse, while the large barrack-like building furnished bachelor quarters for the unmarried men. Gregory, since Everett’s arrival, had shared his house with the artist. Their meals were taken in common with the other men. No one was in the habit of entering the house, Gregory having a kind of office, agreeably furnished, at the cotton mill, where he was usually to be found when not at work in field or wood. This was, however, often the case, for he never failed to discharge the daily quota of manual labour which he had assigned himself; and it was noticeable to all that if any task were of an offensive or difficult nature, he was the one to assume it first and as a matter of course. It was owing to this characteristic, perhaps more than to any other, save his singular personal ascendency, that the silent dictatorship of Gregory in the little community was so cheerfully accepted. Nominally the government of the village was in the hands of a board of directors, with an inner executive committee, and of which Gregory was chairman. Several women served on the larger board. Keith Burgess was a director; Anna’s name had not been proposed for the office. There had been but one vacancy in the board on their arrival, which was sufficient reason. The councils of the directors were held weekly in Gregory’s office, and thus far a good degree of harmony prevailed.

Again it was Saturday morning. A week had passed which had brought many days of heavy rain. The river, swollen and yellow, dashed noisily down from the gorge and filled its channel below with deep and urgent current. On its turbid flood appeared from time to time newly felled logs, floated down from the regions above, where Fraternia men were at work, taking advantage of the swollen river for conveying their lumber to the sawmill. A west wind, the night before, had blown the clouds before it, and this morning the sun shone from an effulgent sky; the wind had died to a soft breeze laden with manifold fragrance; and in place of the chill of the north, the air possessed the indescribable softness and balm of the southern spring.

It was again a busy morning in Fraternia, and everywhere, and in all the homely tasks, thrilled the unchecked joy in simple existence of innocent hearts living out their normal bent for mutual help and burden-sharing. In the garden ground around their house, which was high up the valley in a group of three others, one of which contained the common kitchen and dining room for the inmates of all, Anna Burgess was at work in her garden, sowing and planting in the damp soil. Glancing down the valley, she could see Everett hard at work with another man, who had been an architect in Burlington, erecting a little thatched pavilion, of original design, graceful and rustic, to protect the new and precious fountain from the sun, and keep its water clean and serviceable. Across the river, in the library, Keith, she knew, was at work at his bookkeeping, and also at the task of collecting excerpts from the writings of social economists for use in an address which he was preparing. A new mental activity had been stimulated in Keith by the change of climate and conditions, and the influx of new ideas; and the ease and cheerfulness with which he had adapted himself to the primitive habits of pioneer life, would have amazed his friend Ward.

Barnabas had been gathering one or two sizable slabs of stone which had been left from the lining and coping of the fountain, and Anna watched him a moment as, having loaded them into a wheelbarrow, he proceeded to carry them down to the new bridge, and so across to the west side of the river. She hardly cared to wonder what he was about to do, being otherwise absorbed, and her eyes did not follow him as he wheeled his burden on up the knoll on which were the library and the house of Gregory, set in their bit of pine wood.

The door of Gregory’s cabin stood open, as was customary in Fraternia in mild weather. Barnabas dropped the burden from his barrow just before the open door, stood to wipe the sweat from his forehead, and then, kneeling, began the self-imposed effort of placing the stones together for a low step, which was yet lacking to the rudely finished house. As he worked, he now and then lifted his eyes and glanced into the interior of the house which he had never entered. It had the walls and ceiling of unplaned, uncovered boards of all the Fraternia houses; the floor was absolutely bare and absolutely clean, damp in spots and redolent of soap from recent scrubbing. The open windows let in the sun-warmed, piney air, but the light was obscured, the trees growing close to the house, and a dim gold-green twilight reigned in the silent room. A door stood open into the second room where two narrow iron beds came within the field of vision. There was the ordinary chimney, built of brick, of ample proportions, with a pine shelf running across, and in the fireplace logs of fat pine laid for a blaze in the evening, which was still sure to be cool. Plain wooden arm-chairs stood near the hearth; an uncovered table of home manufacture, clumsy and heavy, in the middle of the room, was thickly strewn with books and papers and writing materials. It was the typical Fraternia interior,—bare, and yet not comfortless, and with its own effect of simple distinction, conveyed by absolute cleanness, order, and the absence of the superfluous.

But it was none of these details which caught the eye of Barnabas. Above the chimney there was fastened by hidden screws close against the wall, so that it had the effect of a panel, a picture, unframed, showing the figure of a slender girl with uplifted head and solemn eyes, set against an Oriental background. It was Everett’s study of the Girlhood of the Virgin, and besides it there was no picture nor decoration of any sort in the place.

Each time he lifted his eyes from the stones before him to the picture whose high lights gleamed strangely through the dimness of the room within, Barnabas was more impressed with some elusive resemblance in the face; and at last, striking the stone with his hand, he murmured to himself in his native tongue, “Now I have it! The damsel there is like our lady when she prays.”

Meanwhile the river ran between and thundered over the dam below; the red roofs gleamed warm in the sun, and Anna, down on her knees like Barnabas, on a bit of board, was tending her bulbs with loving hands, while within her was springing a very rapture of poetic joy. Almost for the first time in her life she was conscious of unalloyed happiness. Was it because the sky was blue? or because the vital flood of spring beat and surged about her in the river, in the forest, in the air? Not wholly; nor even because under these kindly influences all the dormant poetic and creative instincts of her nature were stirring into luxuriant blossoming, although all these things filled her with throbbing delight. The deeper root of her joy was in the satisfaction, so long delayed, of her passion for brotherhood with lowly men and poor; the release from the constraint of artificial conventions, and from the painful sense, which she could never escape in the years of her Fulham life, that she owed to every weary toiler who passed her on the street an apology for her own leisure, her luxury and ease.

Suddenly Anna rose, and stood facing the west, her eyes full of light. A voice within her had called and said:—

“I can write poetry now, and I will!” The fulness of energy of joy and fulfilment in her spirit sought expression as naturally as the mountain spring sought its outlet in the fountain below.

Just then her neighbour, in the house on the left,—it was the dining-house,—put her head out of the window and said, reflectively:—

“Say, Sister Benigna, I wish I knew how to get the dinner up into the woods to the men-folks. It’s half-past eleven and time it went this minute, and Charley has gone down to Spalding after the mail; but I suppose it’s late or something. Anyway he ain’t here, and I’ve got the rest to wait on.”

“Why, I could take the dinner pails up to them, Sister Amanda,” answered Anna, obligingly. The “men-folks” alluded to were of her own group of families and were felling lumber in the woods north of the valley.

“You couldn’t do it alone, but FrÄulein Frieda, she’d be tickled to death to go with you. There she is now,” and Sister Amanda flew to the cabin door through which a neatly ordered dinner table could be seen, and shouted down the slope to the young German teacher who had just come over the bridge with some books on her arm from the library.

A few moments later Anna sallied out from the house with Frieda, both carrying well-stored dinner pails.

“No matter,” said Anna, smiling at the sudden diversion from her poetic inspiration; “it is better to live brotherhood than to sing brotherhood. But some day, maybe, yet, I shall sing.”

Relays of men had been at work in the woods clothing the steep banks of the ravine above Fraternia for three days, even while the rain was falling in torrents. It was absolutely necessary to secure the lumber while the river was of a depth to carry it down stream, and for a time all other work was in abeyance.

Gregory had worked steadily with the rest at the wood cutting, but Keith had told Anna the night before that on Saturday morning he would be obliged to go down to Spalding, the small town in the plain below the valley, on urgent business concerning notes which were coming due and must be extended if possible.

It was therefore with great surprise that Anna, as they approached the spot where the men were at work, heard Frieda exclaim:—

“There is the master himself; see, Sister Benigna!”

They had had a merry scramble up the gorge, but a hard one. The swollen stream had submerged the narrow path by which the ascent was commonly made, and it was only by finding the footholds cut out by the men with their axes in the earth of the dripping, slippery bank above, that Anna and her companion had been able to make their way on. Holding their pails with one hand and clinging to overhanging branches or roots of ferns and laurel with the other, shaking the splashes of rain from the dripping leaves as they struck their faces, the two had scrambled breathlessly forward; and now, at length, the welcome sound of the axe greeted their ears, and they saw a little beyond, strewing the underbrush, the new chips and shining splinters of stripped bark which told that trees had recently been felled.

Anna had just stopped to exclaim:—

“How good it smells, Frieda,—such a wild, pure smell!” and was laughing at her own choice of adjectives, when Frieda had called her attention to John Gregory. He was standing at no great distance from them in the midst of the rapid, roaring creek where the water reached nearly to the tops of his high boots, and, with a strong pole in both hands, was directing the course of the logs, which were eddying wildly about him on the surface of the torrent, into the proper channel which should carry them down stream.

Frieda’s voice attracted his attention to their approach, and without pause he strode through the water, leaped up the bank and was promptly in the path, if it could be called such, before them, holding out both hands to relieve them of their burdens, and smiling a cordial greeting.

Anna’s cheeks wore a vivid flush.

“Then you did not go to Spalding?” she asked, seeking to quiet the confusion of her surprise and the immoderate beating of her heart. Frieda, she saw gratefully, was quite as excited; it was so unusual for Mr. Gregory to bestow attentions of this sort upon them; it was not strange that one should be a little stirred.

“No,” he said, leading on in the now broadening path, “I found I could send a letter by Charley, and the men rather needed a long-legged fellow like myself up here this morning. But I see that my doing this has reacted unexpectedly upon you. Charley not being on hand to bring the dinner, our ladies have had to take his place,” and Gregory turned toward them as he spoke with regret and apology which were evidently sincere.

“Are you very tired?” he asked simply, looking at Frieda but speaking to Anna.

They both declared that it had been great fun and they were not in the least tired; and indeed the bright bloom of their cheeks, and the laughter in their eyes, and the elastic firmness of their steps were sufficient reassurance.

“I think, Mr. Gregory,” said Anna, quite at her ease now, “that Fraternia women can never know anything of that disease of civilization, nervous prostration. It will become extinct in one spot at least.”

“‘More honoured in the breach than the observance,’” quoted Gregory, “we shall hail its loss.”

Soon they reached a little clearing, where, the underbrush trampled down, the rugged steepness of the bank declining to a gentler slope, and the sun having found full entrance by reason of the removal of the larger trees, there was a possibility of finding a dry place to rest. Here they were soon joined by half a dozen men, several of whom had brought their dinner with them, and preparations were made for a fire to heat the coffee which filled one of the pails brought by Anna and Frieda. The other was solidly packed with sweet, wholesome brown bread and butter and thick slices of meat.

The fat pine chips and splinters burned readily in spite of the all-pervading dampness, and the coffee-pail, suspended over this small camp-fire from a hastily improvised tripod, was soon sending up a deliciously fragrant steam.

The men treated the two women as if they had been foreign princesses, covering a great tree-trunk with their coats for a kind of throne for them, and serving them with coffee in tin cups with much flourish of mock ceremony. This part of the proceedings John Gregory watched from a little distance, leaning against a tree, a smile of quiet pleasure in his eyes. He refused the coffee for himself, drinking always and only water, but ate the bread and meat they handed him with hearty relish and a vast appetite.

By a sort of inevitable gravitation, almost before the meal was concluded, Frieda had strayed off into the woods with Matt Taylor, son of Anna’s neighbour, whose devotion to her was one of the especial interests for Fraternia folk that spring. A certain view from the crest of the hill beyond the little clearing was by no means to be missed. Then, one after the other, the men took up their axes and returned to their work; but John Gregory kept his place, and still stood leaning against the tree, facing Anna, the smouldering embers of the fire between.

He had been speaking on a subject in which all had been interested,—the prayer test advocated by Mr. Tyndall, which had attracted the attention of the scientific and religious world of that time. The men had gone away reluctantly, leaving the conversation to these two. Heretofore Anna had hardly spoken, but now with deepening seriousness she said:—

“I feel the crude, incredible impertinence of such a test as this which Mr. Tyndall has proposed, and yet it brings up very keenly to me my own attitude for many years.”

Gregory looked a question, but did not speak, and Anna went on:—

“A good woman whom I once heard speak at Mrs. Ingraham’s in Burlington gave me an idea of prayer, quite new to me then, but which I at least partially accepted, and which has had its effect on my inner life ever since.”

“It was—?”

“That we were to pray to God for every small material interest of life, and were to expect definite, concrete, physical return. That if such was not our experience it was because we were not dwelling near God, and were out of harmony with him. This life of answered prayer and perfect demonstrable union which she described was called the ‘higher life.’”

“What was your own experience?”

“It has been a long experience of spiritual defeat. I prayed for years for every temporal need, asked for whatever I deeply desired, and—never—perhaps there was one exception, but hardly more—received an answer to my praying which I could fairly assume to be such.”

Anna’s face was profoundly sad, as she spoke, with the sense of the baffling disappointments of years.

“In the end what has been the effect on you?”

“I have ceased to pray at all, Mr. Gregory. I know that sounds very harsh, perhaps very wrong, but I lost the expectation of a response, and the constant defeat and failure made me bitter and unbelieving. God seemed only to mock my prayers, not to fulfil. It seemed to me at last that I was dishonouring him by praying, and that waiting in silence and patience was shown to be my portion. Do you think that was sinful?”

Anna raised her eyes timidly to Gregory’s face with this question, and met the repose and steady confidence of it with a swift presentiment of comfort.

“No,” he answered; “I think you were simply struggling to release yourself from the meshes of the net which a mercenary conception of prayer cannot fail to throw over the soul. It was said of John Woolman, and a holier man never lived, that he offered no prayers for special personal favours. I believe the theory of prayer of your Burlington friend not only mistaken, but dangerous and misleading. Instead of such a habit of mind as she described being a ‘higher life,’ I should call it a lower one. The nearer the man comes to God, the less he prays, not the more, for definite objective things and externals; the more he rests on the great good will of God. Prayer was not designed for man to use to conform a reluctant God to his will, to get things given him, but to conform the man’s own blind and erring will to the divine. By this I do not mean to say that no prayers for temporal objects are granted. Many have been, but the soul that feeds itself on this conception of prayer as a system of practical demand and supply lives on husks.”

“But there are many promises?” Anna said with hesitation.

“Yes,” said Gregory, with the emphasis of sure conviction, crossing the space between them to stand directly before her, forgetting all his usual scruples; “but you must interpret Scripture by Scripture, by the whole tendency and purpose, not by isolated mottoes which men like to drag out for spiritual decoration, breaking off short all their roots which reach down into the solid rock of universal Truth! Look at our Lord himself—did he ask for ‘ease and rest and joys’? It is only as we enter into his spirit that our prayers are answered, and that almost means that we shall cease to pray at all for personal benefits. He prayed, often, whole nights together, but was it that he might win his own cause with the people about him? Was it not rather for the multitudes upon whom he had compassion, and that God the Father should be made manifest in himself? Ah, Sister Benigna, few of us have sounded the depths of this great subject of prayer. It is one of the deepest things of God; and, believe me, it is not until we have cast out utterly the last shred of the notion of childish coaxing of God to do what will please us, that we can catch some small perception of its meaning. But let me say just one thing more: you are too young to count any prayer unanswered. At present you see in part and interpret God’s dealings only in part. At the end of life your interpretation will be larger, calmer than it is now. We ‘change the cruel prayers we made,’ and even here live to praise God that they are broken away ‘in his broad, loving will.’”

Anna sat in silence, her eyes downcast, slowly passing in review the nature of her own most ardent prayers and the deep anguish and doubt of their non-fulfilment. Not one, she saw, could bear the high test of likeness to the mind of Christ, not one but had its admixture of selfishness, not one but seemed poor and vain in this new light. A nobler conception of the relation of her soul to God seemed to dawn within her. She looked up then, and saw upon Gregory’s face that inner illumination which belongs to the religious genius. The look of it smote her eyes as if with white and dazzling light, and they fell as if it were impossible to bear it. Then she rose, and they stood for a moment alone and in silence, while a sense of measureless content overflowed Anna’s spirit, and for an instant made time and space and human relations as if they were not. So strong upon her was the sense of uplift from the contact with the spirit of Gregory. She hardly knew at first that the incredible had happened. John Gregory had taken her hand in his, with reverent gentleness, for some seconds. He was asking her if he had been able to help her in any wise, and asking it as if he cared very much. She said “yes,” quite simply, and turned to go. Frieda was coming back, and they were lingering over long. Slowly they descended the rugged path before them, for a strange trepidation had come over Anna,—a vague, new, disturbing joy.

What went ye out into the wilderness for to see?... A man clothed in soft raiment? Behold, they which are gorgeously apparelled, and live delicately, are in kings’ courts.—St. Luke’s Gospel.

Instead of the masterly good humour, and sense of power, and fertility of resource in himself; instead of those strong and learned hands, those piercing and learned eyes, that supple body, and that mighty and prevailing heart, which the father had, whom nature loved and feared, whom snow and rain, water and land, beast and fish, seemed all to know and to serve, we have now a puny, protected person, guarded by walls and curtains, stoves and down-beds, coaches, and menservants and women-servants from the earth and the sky.—R. W. Emerson.

The spring passed in Fraternia, and the summer. Not again did John Gregory and Anna come into direct personal communication. They went indeed their several ways with a steadier avoidance of this than before, from an undefined, but instinctive, sense of danger. Nevertheless, the fact that they breathed the same air and shared the same lot in life sufficed to yield in the heart of each an unfailing spring of contentment; while now and again it would happen that Anna, in her schoolroom or cottage, and Gregory, at his work, lifting their eyes at a footstep or a shadow, would be aware that the other had drawn near and passed by, and contentment would give place to nameless joy.

The poetic impulse which Anna had inherited from both parents, but the expression of which had been stifled by the deadening of her high desires which life in Fulham had brought, now developed unchecked. Many influences promoted this development: her clear child-delight in the rich life of nature about her, the release of her long-cabined spiritual energy, and the stimulation of her powers of discernment and interpretation by contact with the strong intellectual power of Gregory.

Gregory was, in the simple system of life in Fraternia, at once prophet, priest, and king; and his most potent influence over the people was manifest in the Sunday services and in the evening lectures which, for lack of a church, were held in a large empty room on the upper floor of the cotton mill. Anna found in these sermons and lectures the strongest intellectual and spiritual food upon which she had ever fared, and throve apace, having good faculty of assimilation. The verses which she wrote at intervals from a sudden and almost irresistible impulsion were always, when completed, turned over to her husband. Proud and pleased at this new gift of Anna’s, it was Keith’s habit to take them straightway to Gregory. Anna never knew this. She knew, however, that her poetry found its way into print, and now and then, she found, into the hearts of sincere people. This was new food for unaffected gladness, and she was glad.

The summer, although its fierce continuous heat had been hard to bear, was yet the season par excellence for Fraternia, and peace and plenty reigned in the valley. But with the autumn came a change, gradual at first, but later strongly accented. The wholesome occupations of the spring and summer came, of necessity, to a standstill. There was now little vent for the energy and working force of the people, while the scant resources of the narrow valley offered nothing to counteract a dull ennui which settled like a palpable cloud upon them. It had been a bad year for all their crops; the cotton crop had been a total failure, and the mill was shut down. This threw nearly fifty of the little community into enforced idleness, and a smouldering resentment was bred by the discovery that there had never been a profit, but rather a sustained loss, on the output of the mill by reason of Gregory’s scruple against selling at any advance beyond the bare cost of production. This principle might have a fine and lofty sound from the lips of an orator, speaking on broad, general lines; but the hard business sense of average men and women rebelled against the concrete results of its application to their own isolated case.

“If other people did the same, it might work. For one manufactory alone to attempt it is simply commercial suicide,” they said to each other, and with justice.

It became known, moreover, throughout the community, that a heavy mortgage had been placed on the land, held by a rich cotton planter in South Carolina, and that a wide chasm yet intervened between their present condition and that of self-support. A more serious disappointment and a more immediate difficulty, however, lay in the inadequacy of their food products to the needs of the people, and the consequent demand for ready money wherewith to buy the necessities of life.

The fare, hitherto of the simplest, was gradually made coarser and less palatable, since better could not be. Winter was coming on; open-air life had become impossible; fierce winds coming down through the gorge swept the valley, and scattered the foliage of the forest, while a grey and sullen sky hung over, and every day brought chilly rains. There was some sickness, of a mild nature, but it emphasized the discomfort and inconveniences of the homes. The prospect for the coming months in Fraternia grew grim. The enthusiasm of novelty had tided the little community over the two preceding winters, but some stronger upholding must evidently now be interposed; for the people openly murmured, and began to say to each other sullenly, as once another company, “Were we brought out into this wilderness to die? As for this food, our soul loathes it.”

Keenly conscious of the criticism of which he was now the subject, Gregory withdrew proudly more and more within himself, and touched less and less familiarly the life of those about him. It was well known that he deprived himself of all better fare than coarse bread and the water from the spring, that he had unhesitatingly devoted his last dollar to the enterprise so near his heart, and the patience and courage of the man were unfailing. But what of that? It was his own enterprise, with which he must stand or fall. Why should he not risk everything and bear everything? For the rest it was different. They, too, had given their money, and they had left their ceiled houses and their goodly fleshpots and their pleasant social commerce to further his project! They at least expected Christian food!

Crossing the bridge from the library, on a raw afternoon late in November, Anna Burgess met a woman of her own age, a woman of cheerful, sensible temperament and habit, the wife of the architect, whom she had known in Burlington. The husband, George Hanson, had surrendered with unconditional devotion to Gregory’s teaching, and the wife, in loyal sympathy, although herself by no means an idealist, had gathered her little brood of children and a few household treasures together, and had come to Fraternia with him.

As she approached the bridge, Mrs. Hanson, holding up her wet skirts with both hands, cried to Anna:—

“Oh, how I hate this red mud! Don’t you? It seems to me I could stand it better if it were not this horrid colour. One can never get away from it, or lose sight of it.”

Anna, who thus far, with only a few others, still kept heart and courage unbroken through this gloomy season, replied cheerfully that she rather liked the colour.

Mrs. Hanson gave a mournful sigh.

“You like Fraternia anyway, don’t you, Sister Benigna? You always did?”

Anna smiled at the naÏvetÉ of the question, and assented.

“I must like what I have chosen above all other things.”

“Well, I confess I never did like it, and I never shall. Oh, it will do very well for a summer vacation if one could be sure of getting safe home at the end. But as for a life like this! and when it comes to bringing up children here!—” and Mrs. Hanson’s voice broke into a suppressed sob.

“I am sorry,” said Anna, gently.

“Oh, Sister Benigna!” cried the other, letting loose the floodgates of her tears, while they still stood on the bridge in the piercing rain, “I never was so homesick in my life! When I hear my children asking if they are not going home to see grandma pretty soon, it just breaks my heart. They have no appetite for this hard meat and coarse bread, and they look so white and thin, and plead so for a good old-fashioned turkey dinner! I have a little money of my own, and I would spend every cent of it for better food for them, but Mr. Hanson, he says that would be unjust to the rest who cannot have such things, and that all must share alike. He says it would cost a hundred dollars to give one such dinner as the children want to the whole village.”

“I suppose that is true,” said Anna, seriously; “and then it would only be harder to come back—”

“To prison fare,” Mrs. Hanson interjected with unconcealed bitterness. “Well, all I have to say is that, if this is coÖperation, I’ve had all I want of it. As for ‘the brotherhood of man,’ I wish I may never hear of it again as long as I live! I believe we have some duties to ourselves.”

With this she passed slowly on, and Anna hastened homeward, a deep pang in her heart.

Entering her own house, she found Keith, pale and dispirited, leaning with outstretched hands over the fire in an attitude unpleasantly suggestive of decrepitude and want. He looked up as Anna came in, and smiled faintly.

“I think I have taken a fresh cold,” he said hoarsely; “this climate is lovely half the year, but the other half—” and he left the sentence unfinished, coughing sharply.

Anna sat down by the hearth and removed her mud-sodden shoes, afterward hastening to prepare such scanty remedies for Keith as the cabin afforded. There was a dispensary down at the mill. She would go down for medicine as soon as she had made him comfortable. On the surface of her mind lay the habit of sympathy and care for her husband’s fragile health, but in the depth below was a sense she could not have formulated to herself of resentment at his lack of courage and fortitude. For Keith, although too finely courteous to share in the open murmuring of the people, was himself in the full swing of reaction from the comparative enthusiasm which he had felt six months ago. The fall weather had brought on ague, which, added to his chronic physical weakness, made him altogether wretched; and while he punctiliously avoided contributing to the public discontent, Anna perceived and understood perfectly his weariness with the enterprise. For the first time in their married life his patience and sweetness of temper failed; he had grown irritable, and fretted at small inconveniences in a way which chafed Anna’s hardier spirit indescribably.

“I am very sorry, Keith, you are so miserable to-day,” Anna said now, with half-mechanical commiseration. It chanced that, as she had come on her way home from the little conversation with Mrs. Hanson, a new sympathy had taken possession of her for the lonely man upon whom fell the full burden of all this reaction, but who bore it with such unflinching patience, albeit so silently. Almost inevitably, her mind being thus absorbed, the sympathy with Keith in his familiar ailments and complaints was rendered perfunctory for the time, and by comparison his weakness wore to her some complexion of unmanliness.

Perhaps Keith discerned a shade of coldness in her tone, and was stirred by it.

“I am sure I do not know,” he said with significant emphasis, “how long I can stand this condition of things. You must see, Anna, that I am losing ground from day to day. Look at my hands!” and he held out his left hand to her, clammy and cold, for all the yellow blaze, wasted and thin even to emaciation.

Anna took the hand in hers, and caressed it with womanly gentleness, murmuring that it was too bad, and something must be done; he certainly was not properly nourished.

“Why, Anna,” the poor fellow cried, warmed by her compassion, “I would give all my ‘incomes from dreamland,’ all the fine-spun theories of economic religion and social salvation that Gregory or any other idealist ever dreamed of, to be for just one day in our own dear old library, warmed all through, floor warm, walls warm—everything, you know; to see you, beautifully dressed again, at your own table, with its silver and damask; to have the service we always had; and once, just once, Anna—to have all the hot water I want for a bath!”

Anna smiled, but forebore to speak. The echo of Mrs. Hanson’s wail was almost too much for her, and yet she pitied and understood. Pioneers must be made of sterner stuff, that was all; men who, like Emerson’s genius, should “learn to eat their meals standing, and to relish the taste of fair water and black bread.” Were there such men? She knew one. She almost began to doubt if there were any more. A few moments later she brought Keith a tray containing tea and toast, served with such little elegance as was possible, and with the daintiness of shining linen and silver.

“We must find a way for you to spend the winter in a different climate,” she said, as she stood beside him. She spoke very kindly, but with the inward sense of concession as of the stronger to the weaker. “You certainly cannot remain here if this ague continues.”

Keith watched her gratefully, as she prepared to go out again, sure of some effective help when her strong determination was enlisted. The last six months had revealed his wife to him as six years had not done before. As she was about leaving, he said thoughtfully:—

“Anna, I am not the only one to be anxious about. Perhaps you do not know it fully, but the whole scheme of Fraternia is on the edge of collapse.”

“How do you mean, dear?” she asked, alarmed.

“Through lack of funds. He says very little, but I can see that Gregory has practically reached the end of his resources and expectations.”

Anna’s face showed her great concern.

“I did not know it was so bad,” she answered. “Oh, Keith, would you not be willing to help out a little more? I know you have been wonderfully generous, but some one must come up to the point of real sacrifice and save the day. You could sell the Mill Street property, you know?” and the timid tone of her final question contrasted strangely with that in which she had begun speaking.

It was the expression of Keith’s face which had dashed Anna’s confidence. She had never seen him look so much like his mother as when he replied.

“No, my dear, I shall have to stand my ground,” he said, “and abide by the terms I first proposed. My mother’s estate is not to be sacrificed for this doubtful experiment. More than ever before I feel the problematic nature of Gregory’s scheme. We must provide for our own future as well as for his present crisis.”

It was hard, Anna felt, as she started out again alone into the wind and rain, not to reflect that, perhaps, the sooner the experiment proved a failure the better Keith would be satisfied. She struggled against a rising sense of anger which the separation of their interest from Gregory’s gave her, at the characteristic caution, the irritating prudence, the old familiar inflexibility, so like his mother. Keith’s decision chafed her all the more because something warned her, in her own despite, that he was after all justified in it. But the contrast between his softness of yielding toward his own desires for luxury, and the hardness of his withholding from the bare needs of another, came just then into unfortunate juxtaposition.

The attitude of Keith toward Gregory was complex and peculiar. When in the immediate presence of this man he was brought under his personal influence to a degree which even Anna often found surprising. Gregory’s intensely masculine and forceful nature appeared to exert an almost irresistible control over the younger man so long as they were together. As soon, however, as Keith was removed from that immediate influence, he reverted at once to an attitude not only critical toward Gregory, but at times, and as if instinctively, antagonistic.

Anna went on her way down the valley to the cotton mill with a sore and heavy heart. On other days she could rejoice even in a leaden sky, in the muddy, sullen stream, in the stripped branches of the forest; but to-night, for twilight was falling now, all seemed clothed in that oppressive ugliness of Tennyson’s picture:—

Reaching the mill, dark and silent otherwise, she noted a light in Gregory’s office and the sound of voices, but the door was closed. She passed through the corridor to the small room beyond which was used as a dispensary. Pushing open the door she found the room empty; the young man whose charge it was seemed to have betaken himself otherwhere over early. However, Anna’s knowledge of drugs was not inconsiderable, and in this case she knew precisely what Keith needed and where to find it. So she proceeded without delay to place on the small polished counter which stretched across the narrow room, the necessary ingredients for a certain powder, and then carefully mixed these in the proportion called for by her simple prescription. While she was thus occupied she noticed with a sense of discomfort that the voices in the office, only divided from her now by a thin partition, grew louder and took on a disagreeable quality. Presently the door of the office was opened, and some one hastened from the building in evident impatience, leaving the door wide open. There was complete silence for a moment, and then Anna heard John Gregory speak. She could not fail to hear every word, although his voice was not raised, and its wonted quietness and courtesy were unchanged.

“You will bear me witness, nevertheless, Mr. Hanson,” he said, “that I never promised an easy life for those who came with me to Fraternia. I declared plainly that simplicity and poverty and roughness were to be accepted as necessary conditions.”

“That is all very well,” a voice replied, which Anna recognized as that of the Burlington architect, whose wife had evidently been working upon him; “but when simplicity means starvation for delicate women and children, and poverty begins to look like bankruptcy, the situation strikes me as pretty serious. All I have to say is,” and the man’s voice rose to a pitch of high excitement, “you are the dictator here, and you are responsible; you’ve got us into this scrape, Mr. Gregory, by working upon our emotions, and all that, and now you’ve got to get us out of it, somehow!” and with these words Anna heard the speaker leave the office with rapid steps, and a moment after the outer door of the mill closed upon him.

Anna had dropped the powders which she was dividing now into their papers, and had started to go to the door and close it that she might hear no more; but before she could do this a step in the corridor which she knew sent her back to her place with a beating heart, and in another instant John Gregory stood in the doorway.

Anna had never seen his face changed by any mental agitation, nor was it now, save for a touch of weariness and an unwonted pallor. There was a deep, sunk glow in his eyes, which, together with the careless sweep of the grey hair flung off his forehead, recalled with peculiar emphasis the leonine effect Anna had often noticed. The habitual grave composure of his manner was in no way disturbed; and although he could not have known of her presence in the dispensary, it did not seem to cause him surprise.

“Is some one ill at your house?” he asked with evident concern but characteristic abruptness. He was one of those few persons who do not find it necessary to explain what is self-evident.

“Mr. Burgess is not very well,” Anna replied, hesitating somewhat, unwilling to strike another dart into the soreness of his spirit, which she felt distinctly, for all his outward firmness.

“I fear,” Gregory said thoughtfully, “that Mr. Burgess ought not to remain in Fraternia this winter. I am very much afraid that his health will suffer. Both of you deserve a little change,” he continued, with a slight smile, the pathos of which Anna felt sharply. “Fraternia is not so pleasant at this time of year. Why do you not go North for a few months? You would come back to us in the spring—perhaps?”

The apparent carelessness which he wished to convey to this question contrasted strangely with the piercing anxiety of the look with which Gregory’s eyes searched Anna’s face. She understood the instinctive desire to forestall another attack, to take for granted an impending blow.

Quietly working at her powders, laughing a little, by sheer effort of will, since tears were near the surface, she replied:—

“I could not be spared, Mr. Gregory, this winter. I see you are a little disposed to undervalue my services. There are several cases of sickness now, and I am vain enough to think I am needed. Besides, you know, I love Fraternia. I do not want to go away from home.”

The minor arts of coquetry were all unknown and foreign to Anna, but the genius of her woman’s nature and intuition was thrown into the last sentence with full effect.

The strong spirit of Gregory, which could meet the assaults and buffets of reproach and detraction without shrinking, and which would have rejected express sympathy, was mastered for a minute by the delicate comprehension and implied fidelity of Anna’s words.

She knew better than to see the momentary suspicion of dimness in his eyes, or to note the silence which for a little space he did not care to break. When at last he spoke, it was to ask, in a wholly matter-of-fact manner:—

“Have I not heard that Mr. Burgess was a particularly successful public speaker?” Anna looked up quickly then.

“You may have heard it, for I am sure it is true,” she said. Another pause for reflection, and then Gregory said:—

“It is becoming urgently necessary that the purpose and future of Fraternia should be promoted by some one capable of going about, particularly in the cities, and presenting our aims publicly—before audiences of people.”

Anna had gathered up her powders now and put them in her pocket and stood ready to go but she stopped, and her face kindled with swift recognition and welcome of the thought in Gregory’s mind.

“And you have thought that Mr. Burgess might do this, and so still serve the cause and yet do it for a while under easier conditions?” she exclaimed. “Mr. Gregory, I cannot tell you how glad I should be if this plan could be carried out. I am really a little anxious about my husband. I am sure this would work well for every one, and it might solve several problems at once.”

He smiled, a little sadly, at her confident eagerness, said they must consider it seriously, and then stood aside to let her pass out and go home. It was not necessary for him to say, as he bade her good night, that he wished it were expedient for him to walk home with her. She understood his theory of what was wise for himself in such matters. She approved it. Nevertheless, she found it hard to leave him alone just then in the deserted mill. Half-way back she met Everett, plodding through the mud, with his hands in his pockets, and whistling, to keep his spirits up, she fancied.

“Be extra good to Mr. Gregory to-night,” she said, womanlike, unable to resist the longing to help, as he paused a moment.

“Why?” he asked, frowning; “have they been at him again?”

Anna nodded and passed on, afraid to say more.

“Fools!” he murmured between his teeth, and plunged on against the wind.

But Anna went home with a beatific vision to soothe her spirit, of Keith comfortable at last in a good hotel, with menus and waiters, bells and bathrooms, in an infinite series.

Everett had improvised a studio in a low loft over the bachelors’ quarters, contiguous to the cabin which he and Gregory shared.

It was necessary, he said, for him to get down to hard work now. That hedging and ditching nonsense was great sport for a man’s holidays, but he had no more time to play; he must paint. The work he had produced in Fulham had not been, often, especially salable or popular in its character, a certain mystic quality pervading it not readily understood by casual observers. All that, he declared, was now to be rigidly excluded from his painting; he should paint to sell—cheap, pretty things, picturesque, palpable. With this purpose he had set to work with a will, and by February had a few hundred dollars to turn over to the treasury as the fruit of his industry. His pictures were sold in the North through Keith Burgess as intermediary.

He was hard at work in the studio at nine o’clock on a night in February, laying in the outline for a bit of the valley which he declared he could paint now with his eyes shut, he had done it so often, having found it “a good seller,” when he heard Gregory’s step on the stairs. That the boy had just brought the mail up from Spalding Everett knew, having heard the horse galloping over the bridge, and stopping before the house.

Gregory came in now with several letters in his hand, one open. He did not speak at first, and Everett let him walk up and down the place undisturbed, seeing that he was peculiarly perplexed, probably by the open letter, which Everett noticed was in Keith Burgess’s handwriting. After a few moments he remarked slowly, but with an unusually incisive quality in his tone:—

“Burgess is a singularly prudent little man. Did it ever strike you so?”

“He has some capacity, however, for the opposite quality.” Everett threw out this remark with no manifestation of especial interest, and it seemed to pass unnoticed.

“Having it in his power,” Gregory continued, with the same incisive deliberation, “to extricate us from our whole present difficulty himself, with the utmost ease, he yet jogs about the country after a comfortable fashion, presenting the subject publicly as occasion offers, and sends me back such letters as this.”

Lifting the sheet in his hand, Gregory read from it:—

“I held a meeting last night in Grand Rapids, to which I have been working up carefully for over a week through the press, etc. The attendance was fair, and the people listened well. I regret, however, to be obliged to report that the practical results of the meeting were not all that we could have wished—” and dropping the letter, Gregory added:—

“And so on, copiously, through nearly four pages of matchless ambiguity and polite phrases, which could all have been condensed to the usual sum total of his reports; thus far, nothing!”

“Still, Mr. Gregory, we must remember that he did pretty well for the first few weeks.”

“Yes,” said Gregory, nodding a short assent, “while he was covering the field which was ready for harvest—seeing the men already committed to the cause. We can evidently expect nothing more from him. What kind of a speaker is he, Everett?”

“Good, really very good as a special pleader. He had very fair success when he was missionary secretary.”

“I wonder at it,” murmured Gregory,—“a mild, prudent little man like that with his perpetual fears and scruples; I cannot fancy his ever letting himself go.”

Everett, unwontedly sober and silent, worked on. Gregory paced the room for a little while. He wanted to ask Everett how Keith’s marriage with a woman like Anna could ever have come about, but he could not bring himself to frame the question, and presently left the studio.

Hanging about the door below, Gregory found Barnabas Rosenblatt, apparently waiting to speak with him.

“Hello!” said Gregory, not unkindly, but shortly. “Do you want me?”

“Well, shust a minit, if Herr Gregory vas not too busy,” and the little Jew shuffled along by Gregory’s side until they reached the door of the cabin.

Gregory brought his visitor in and gave him a chair, then stirred up a smouldering fire and threw on a piece of pine, which, flaring up into a sudden blaze, made other light unnecessary. The reflection of the yellow flames played weirdly over the walls, and Barnabas seemed unable to withdraw his eyes from the picture above the chimney.

“Our lady,” he said simply, nodding across at Gregory, and closing his eyes impressively.

“Well, Barnabas, what is it you want?” asked his host.

“It’s our lady,” said Barnabas, sniffing quite vigorously; “das is it. How she fall off!” and he shook his head with a slow, mournful motion.

“Fall off what? I do not understand, Barnabas. You are speaking of Sister Benigna?” Gregory’s face changed.

“So—so—” and the little man nodded emphatically. “She’s got awful poor! Oh, my! Her bones comes right through zu next. My Kleine, she say our lady don’t eat notin’s, shust only leetle, leetle milk, an’ work, work, work, like a holy angel everywheres at one time, up an’ down the valley; sick folks an’ well folks, all derselbe. Light come all place she come!” and Barnabas relapsed into meditative silence, having found his vocabulary hard tested by this prolonged statement.

“Do you mean that Sister Benigna is sick?” asked Gregory, with slight sharpness.

“Ja, ja, Herr Gregory; she has went home sick heut’ abend from the sew class down to der mill. When she go, all go. Fraternia ohne Sister Benigna,” and the little man drew his shoulders quite up to his ears in a characteristic shrug strongly expressive of a thing unthinkable.

Gregory rose, Barnabas following his example.

“I will go over and inquire,” he said, taking his hat, and they left the house at once.

The night was cold, a light fall of snow lay over the valley, and the stars glittered from a frosty sky.

When they reached the neighbourhood of Anna’s cottage Gregory sent Barnabas up to the door, while he waited at a little distance. In a few moments Frieda, who now shared Anna’s cabin, joined him, while Barnabas, with the action of a waiting watch-dog, humble, and yet with a due sense of responsibility, hung about near by. Frieda’s account was reassuring, as far as immediate solicitude for Anna was concerned; she had come home ill from the afternoon sewing class, and had a chill, headache, and fever. She was resting now, and would doubtless be up again in a day or two.

“Nothing can keep her down, Mr. Gregory,” Frieda said in conclusion. “I am not frightened just now, but we all see plainly that Sister Benigna is killing herself by inches. She eats hardly anything, and yet works as if there were no limit to her strength. Sometimes I think she is just laying down her very life for us here in Fraternia, and we’re not worth it,” and with this Frieda’s voice broke a little, and without stopping to say more she hurried back.

Gregory bade Barnabas good night hastily, and then, instead of going home, he walked rapidly down the rough road to the mill, unlocked the door, and went into his office and sat down at his desk. His face had changed strangely; it had grown grey and his lips were tightly compressed. He sat long in motionless silence, thinking intensely. Although he had himself watched Anna with growing uneasiness, the suggestions of Frieda and Barnabas came upon him with startling effect. He asked himself now with unsparing definiteness whether this was indeed the final turn of the wheel of torture on which he was bound, or whether he could wait for another. The conviction was upon him, stark and stern, that in the end he should yield and seek the one means of escape which was still open to him, and which he had been holding off with almost dogged resolution. He recalled the shaping of events in Anna’s life during the last few months, and his face softened.

Late in November, when Keith went North, she had accompanied him, having been sent for by her sister Lucia. Their mother, Gulielma Mallison, upon whom age and infirmity had increased heavily, had conceived a controlling desire to return to her childhood home, the Moravian town of Bethlehem, to end her days. Anna had visited Haran therefore, and had brought her mother back to her early home, establishing her there in the quiet Widows’ House in peace and satisfaction.

At Christmas, when she returned alone to Fraternia, Anna had seemed to bring with her a new infusion of active and aggressive force. Relieved of anxiety for Keith, whom she had left in good spirits, and from the constant ministration to his comfort, she was now wholly free to devote herself to the common good. With new and contagious ardour she had thrown herself therefore into the life of the discouraged little community, cheering the faint-hearted and rekindling the flagging purposes of the fickle. She taught the girls and women quaint fashions of embroidery and work on linen which she had learned from her mother, and inspired them with the ambition to earn something with their needles, thus dispelling their listlessness. She seemed at times to possess in her own enthusiasm and courage sufficient motive power to energize them all; she worked and moved among them as if no less a task had been given her, and with a sweetness and sympathy that never failed.

All who watched her wondered at the power in her, and many who had murmured hitherto now declared themselves ashamed, and responded willingly. John Gregory marvelled more and more at the qualities of brilliant leadership which she now developed. Within him a voice, which he could not always silence, sometimes whispered that if such a nature as that which had been gradually revealed to him in Anna Burgess, in its plenitude of power and its greatness of purpose, could have been allied to his own, a movement far beyond what he had even dreamed of in Fraternia might have been possible.

But while a certain reËnforcement of courage had followed Anna’s strong initiative, and while in some respects the domestic conditions of the people had been improved and their murmurings for the time partially silenced, the gravity of the situation and of the prospects for the future as Gregory saw them remained unchanged. Keith’s mission had proved unproductive, as the letter just received emphasized afresh. Gregory himself could not leave Fraternia at this juncture without manifest peril. Only his personal influence now availed to hold together many discordant elements which were very actively at work and arrayed against each other. From no quarter could he discern any hope of substantial support.

And now, last of all, she was laid low; worse, they told him she was laying down her life in her devotion to his cause—she, his one high-hearted, intrepid, dauntless ally! Bitterly Gregory said to himself that she who had freely left wealth and station was starving and working to her death to save him from defeat, and all in vain, unless—Should he calmly sit by and permit the sacrifice? Great of heart as she was, all her work could not avail, nor his, unless aid of another kind could be found, and that at once.

And it could be found; of that he had little doubt. To find it he must, indeed, make a certain compromise, but it was one which involved only himself, his own position,—perhaps, after all, only his own pride. Had he not himself preached against the subtle selfishness which underlies the passion for individual perfection? Did not the common good and the larger interests of his cause call for the sacrifice?

Gregory rose at last and went to the outer door of the mill. It was five o’clock of the February morning, and off to the east a faint yellowish light was climbing up the sky. The mill pond lay dead in its stillness below him; the water fell quietly, stilled with ice, over the dam; the valley stretched out white and cold; a mile below was the black belt of the forest, and beyond, the dim plain, with the stars shining over. It was pure and cold and pitiless. In sky or earth no sign of relenting, no suggestion of a gentler day. But Gregory was not looking for signs, or reckoning with omens, save the omen which had come unasked and taken up its abode in his mind. He was thinking, not of the scene before him, nor of the sleeping village behind, nor even of the outline of the future, nor of Anna in her pain and patience.

An old story was repeating itself within him of the ancient king to whom the sibyl came bringing nine books, which, being offered, he rejected; and of how, in the end, it had been the fate of the king to desire the three which alone were left, and to obtain them at a threefold price.

Presently the door of the mill was closed, and Gregory returned to his desk. There was sternness in his face as he set about writing a letter, and self-disdain and humiliation; but he wrote on, and finished the letter, which he signed and sealed. Then, without further hesitation or pause, he crossed the road to the mill stables, brought out and saddled his own horse, a tall roan, fit to carry a man of his proportions, mounted it, and rode away down the valley toward Spalding. The letter which he chose to mail with his own hand was addressed to Senator Ingraham, and it stated briefly that the writer had come to the conclusion that his rejection of the generous gift offered him on a certain night known to them both was ill advised, and that if the same or any part of it were offered him now for the furtherance of his coÖperative work, it would not be refused.

A week passed, and Anna, protesting that she was as well as ever, had returned to her regular round of cares. The only change in her appearance was a peculiar whiteness of the tints of her skin, such that her face at times seemed actually to emit light. The contrast of this whiteness of tint with the masses of her dull, dark hair and the large, clear eyes, full of the changing lights which lurk in hazel eyes, gave her at this time a startling beauty, startling because it suggested evanescence. Most marked, Fraternia people said, was this phase of Anna’s appearance on a night near the end of another week, when a large company was gathered in the hall over the mill for an entertainment. Anna had been much interested through the winter in a series of author’s evenings, and this chanced to be the occasion for the closing programme of the series. The subject was Lowell, and prose had been read and poetry declaimed; the changes rung on all,—humorous, pathetic, and patriotic. The little hall was full and the audience eager for the closing number, because it was to be given by Anna herself, who had a charming gift in rendering poetry.

She had chosen a number of passages from the “Commemoration Ode,” and as she stood on the platform with its dark crimson background and drapery, dressed, as she was habitually when indoors, in white, her eyes kindling as she spoke the noble words of the noblest American poem, the audience watched her face with an attention even closer than that with which they listened to her voice. This, indeed, showed a slight weakness, but the eloquence and energy of her spirit subdued it to a deeper pathos, while its impressiveness was most marked when she reached the close of the fifth strophe, every word of which to her meant John Gregory:—

She was half-way through the lines when a striking and incomprehensible change passed over her. Her eyes dilated, then drooped, her breath almost forsook her, and her quiet hands clasped each other hard. She continued to speak, but her voice had lost its tone and timbre. Almost mechanically she kept on to the close of the part she had selected, but those who loved her feared to see her fall before the end. When she reached the room behind the stage, the faithful Frieda was waiting to receive her.

What had happened? Was it merely that Sister Benigna was still weak from her illness? As they broke up, these questions were repeatedly asked among the people. Some of them called attention to the fact that while she was speaking a stranger had tiptoed into the hall so noiselessly that only a few persons had been aware of his coming, but he was a man of so singular a physiognomy and an expression so repellent that a vague connection was felt to link Anna’s agitation with his appearance.

This man was Oliver Ingraham.

Anna, with Frieda, hurrying out of the mill alone into the blackness of the starless and stormy night, and turning homeward, heard steps approaching, heavy and hard. Some one passed them. Anna knew only by the great height and breadth of shoulder, dimly discerned through the dark, that it was Gregory. She stopped, and he turned, catching a glimpse of her white face.

“Mr. Gregory,” she said, “Oliver Ingraham is here. What can it mean?”

“Here already!” he cried almost harshly. “I have only this moment received a despatch!” and he hastened forward, as if he might yet interpose some obstacle to this most unwelcome arrival.

The words in the despatch, crumpled fiercely and thrust into Gregory’s pocket, were these:—

“My son will be the bearer of the funds required. Trust you will give him the opportunity he desires for study of social problems.

It was the first word of reply to his letter which Gregory had received, and it was a word which made him set hard his teeth and groan like a wounded lion.

“Perhaps it is fair,” he said to himself, as he crossed the bridge; “but Ingraham’s Nemesis as the price is a higher one than even I expected.”

Above, in the mill hall, Oliver was mingling with the people who were in the habit of remaining together for an hour of social interchange after the programme, on these occasions. He quickly found his old townsman, Mr. Hanson, who seemed more amazed than rejoiced to greet him in Fraternia.

“Stopped over, eh, to see our village?” he asked. “On your way North, I suppose?”

“Oh, no,” said Oliver, smiling complacently; “I have come straight from home. I have a commission for your czar from my father, and I rather look to throwing in my fortunes with you folks. I want to see how this experiment works; study it, you know, on all sides. If I like it, I guess I shall stay.”

“Oh, really,” said Hanson, a little aghast.

“How are you getting on, anyway?” proceeded Oliver, craftily. “Rose-colour washed off yet? Has it been pretty idyllic this winter? Say, I should think catering for a crowd up in this valley would be quite a job. Don’t get salads and ices every day, I take it.”

Hanson shook his head impatiently, longing to get away from the questioner.

“Well,” said Oliver, “I suppose by this time Gregory the Great has issued his edicts and made all the poor people rich, hasn’t he? and all the rich people poor? That seems to be the method of evening up. I don’t wonder the poor fellows like it. Should think they would.”

“You will know better about us when you have been here awhile, Mr. Ingraham.”

Oliver nodded cheerfully. “Oh, yes, of course. I am going to take notes, you see. Perhaps I’ll write it up by and by,” and he tapped the neat note-book which protruded from a pocket of his coat. “Are all the sinners saints by this time?” he added.

“Hardly.”

“Well, then, we’ll put it the other way,” said Oliver, with a peculiar significance in his high voice, “are the saints all sinners yet?” The malicious leer with which this question was accompanied seemed to turn it into a hateful insinuation, which Hanson, with all his half-suppressed discontent, resented hotly. He was about to make a hasty reply when Gregory came up and spoke to Oliver, to whom he held out his hand. His manner was as cold as could be with decent courtesy, and when Oliver had shaken his hand he passed his handkerchief over it with the impulse a man has after touching a slug or a snake.

Oliver noticed the gesture, and rubbed his long white hands together reflectively.

It was mid-April and the afternoon of a day of perfect weather, of summer rather than spring.

The hills around Fraternia were covered now in sheets of flame-colour, white and rose, from the blossoming of the wild azalea and laurel. The air was laden with perfume and flooded with sunshine.

It was at the close of the afternoon school when Anna, a company of the children with her, started to climb the eastern hill which rose a little beyond the mill pond, to gather flowers.

Gregory, from the open window of his office in the mill, watched the pretty troop as they threaded their way up the steep path and were soon lost to sight in the woods. He heard them speak of Eagle Rock as the goal of their expedition,—a favourite point of view, less than a mile to walk, and nearly on the crest of the hills.

Anna was dressed in the coarse white cotton of Fraternia manufacture which was the usual dress of the girls and women of the village in the house and out in dry, warm weather, simply made, easily laundered, cleanly, and becoming. Her tall figure, the last to disappear up the woodland path, had attracted the eyes of another, as well as of John Gregory.

Oliver Ingraham, in these two months grown an all-too-familiar figure in Fraternia, finding his way stealthily and untiringly to every favourite nook and corner of the valley, had also watched the start from some lurking-place. It was half an hour later when Gregory noticed him sauntering casually along the foot of the hill, and with an air of indifference striking into the same path which Anna and the children had taken. Gregory watched him a moment fixedly, his eyebrows knit together, and he bit his lip with impatience and disgust. Of late Oliver had shown an ominous propensity to haunt Anna, whose dislike of his presence amounted well-nigh to terror. More than once Gregory’s watchful eyes, which never left Oliver’s movements long unnoted, had observed attempts on his part to follow or to overtake her, to seek her out and attach himself to her. Invariably Oliver found himself foiled in these attempts, although he had no means of attributing the interference to Gregory. Thus far the intervention had been accomplished almost unnoticeably, but none the less effectively.

The afternoon was a busy one for Gregory. The mill, no longer silent and deserted, was running now on full time; and, to the great satisfaction of a majority of the colonists, Gregory had withdrawn his scruples against selling the products of their manufacture at a reasonable profit. He was finding it easier and easier to compromise with his initial scruples. It had also become more imperative to try to meet, in so far as was reasonable, the demands of the people, since already Fraternia had suffered serious defections. A number of substantial families had withdrawn earlier in the spring, among them the Hansons and the Taylors, who had taken the pretty FrÄulein Frieda with them, to Anna’s great regret. Others talked of leaving, and, in spite of the greater financial easiness, criticism and jealousy were at work in the little company at first so united. The almost insuperable difficulties attending the experiment had now fully declared themselves.

However, there was plenty of work to do, which was a material relief. Gregory glanced now at the pile of papers before him on his desk, and then once more through the window at the figure of Oliver, receding up the hill. No, he could not run the risk of allowing him to overtake and annoy Anna. The work must wait. Taking his hat, he left the mill hastily; but, instead of choosing the path behind Oliver, Gregory turned and went up the valley a little distance, struck through behind the houses, crossed a bit of boggy ground which lay at the foot of the hill in this part of the valley, and so mounted the hill below Eagle Rock in a line to intercept Oliver before he could overtake Anna, if such were his purpose.

There was no path up this side of the hill, but Gregory found no trouble in striding through the deep underbrush which would have swamped the women and children completely. Soon he reached a point from which he commanded a sight of Eagle Rock, and a glance showed him the fluttering dresses of the children already on its summit. In another moment he dashed up on a sharp climb, for the hill was very steep at this point, and reached the path only a short distance from the base of the rock. He looked up, but no one was in sight; then down the path, and in a moment Oliver came into view walking much more rapidly than fifteen minutes before, when he had entered the woods. He slackened his pace as he caught sight of Gregory slowly approaching down the path, and sought to hide a very evident discomfiture with his evil smile.

“You got up here in pretty good time, didn’t you, Mr. Gregory?” he asked, as he reached him. “I saw you, seems to me, in your office when I came along. I’ve taken my time, you see. A beautiful day for a walk.”

Oliver’s small green-grey eyes twinkled wickedly as he spoke these apparently harmless words, for he saw, or felt, that beneath every one of them Gregory’s anger, roused at last, reached a higher pitch. Oliver perfectly understood what he was here for.

“I have a word to say to you,” said Gregory, stormily. “You will have to stop haunting the women and children, and annoying them with your attentions. I speak perfectly plainly, Mr. Ingraham; they are not agreeable and they must be stopped.”

“You rule with a rod of iron here, Gregory,” said Oliver, his long fingers twining together; “what you say goes. Still, you know, you might go a little too far.”

Gregory did not reply, but stood watching him as a lion might watch a reptile.

“I am willing to stay in Fraternia, under favourable conditions,” Oliver proceeded, with hideous cunning; “but I should think, as I am paying pretty well for my accommodations, I ought, at least, to get the liberty of the grounds. What do you say?”

“I say, Go, this minute, or I’ll throw you neck and crop down that bank,” said Gregory, with unmistakable sincerity, at which Oliver, suddenly cowed, and his weak legs trembling under him, faced about promptly and retreated down the path. He paused at a safe distance, while Gregory’s hands tingled to collar him, and called back, in a loud, confidential whisper:—

“You can have her all to yourself this time. That’s all right,” and with this he hurried off, his thin lips writhing in a malicious smile, and his hands clenched tightly and cruelly.

For a moment Gregory stood still in the path. A dark flush had mounted slowly even to his forehead. He was irresolute whether to follow and find Anna, or to return directly to the valley. Something in Oliver’s ugly taunt acted like a challenge upon him, it seemed, for, turning, and catching through the trees the glimmer of Anna’s white dress, he hastened on up the path.

He found her sitting on a mossy rock at the foot of the cliff, where there were trees and shade and a fair view of the valley, and the blue billowing sea of the mountain ranges beyond. Her strength and colour had returned with the out-door life of the spring, and she looked to-day the embodiment of radiant health. Greatly astonished at Gregory’s appearance, she yet welcomed it with unaffected gladness, starting to rise from her low seat with the impulses of social observance which she could not quite outgrow even in the wilderness; but he motioned to her to sit still. All around her the children had flung their branches of laurel and azalea, running off to gather more and bring her, and the delicate suffusion of colour made an exquisite background to the picture. The picture itself, Gregory thought, Everett ought to have painted for a Madonna; for in Anna’s lap leaned a sturdy, fair-haired boy, with a cherub face, a child of less than four years, his head thrust back against her shoulder as he looked out from that vantage ground with serene eyes at Gregory, while Anna held one round little hand in hers and looked down upon the child with all the wistful fondness of unfulfilled maternal love.

“Do not smile,” said Gregory, with affected sternness at last, as she glanced up from the child to him with a questioning smile, expecting some explanation for his presence here; “I have come this time to scold you.”

“O dear!” said Anna, with a gay little laugh of surprise. “My turn has come!”

“Yes, your turn has come,” he continued gravely. “Do you not know that when you come away on such long, lonely climbs as this, even with the children, you give us anxiety for you, and trouble? I have had to come all this distance to take care of you.”

Anna shook her head, much more puzzled than penitent.

“What is there to be troubled about?” she cried.

Gregory did not answer at once. He found it impossible to make mention of Oliver in her presence. He fixed his eyes on the little child, who was on his knees now, by Anna’s side, pouring out into her white dress a small handful of scarlet berries, and letting them run like jewels through his fingers, laughing to see them roll.

“Do you not know,” he began again, very slowly, “that we fear for your strength, for your endurance, upon which you will never, yourself, have mercy?”

Anna began to protest a little, her colour deepening at some vague change in his tone and manner.

“Do you not know,” he continued, not heeding her interruption, “that you are the very heart of our life, here in Fraternia? that we all turn to you for our inspiration, our hope, our ideal? Should we not guard you, since without you we all should fade and fail?”

Never before had Anna heard this cadence of tenderness in Gregory’s voice, nor in the voice of man or woman; the whole strength of his protecting manhood, of his high reverence and his strong heart, was in it, but there was something more. What was it? A tremor ran through Anna’s heart. Could she dare to know? She lifted her eyes at last to meet his look, and what she read was what she had never dreamed of, never feared nor hoped—the supreme human love which a man can know. Reading this, she did not fear nor faint nor draw her own look away, but rather her eyes met his, full of awe and solemn joy; for at last, in that moment, her own heart was revealed to itself.

“O Anna!—O Benigna!”

Gregory spoke at last, or rather it seemed as if the whole deep heart of the man breathed out its life on the syllables of those two names.

In the silence which followed Anna sat quite quiet in her place, the sun and the soft shadows of the young oak leaves playing over her face and figure. The child still tossed his red berries with ripples of gleeful laughter over the whiteness of her dress, and not far away could be heard the busy voices of the older children as they ruthlessly broke away the blossoms from their stems. And in the sun and shade and the stillness Anna sat, while wave after wave of incredible joy broke over her spirit. For the first time in her life she knew love, knowing it for what it was. She had not asked to know it, nor mourned that she had missed its full measure, nor dreamed that it could yet be hers; but it had come, not stayed by bonds nor stopped by vows. It was here! The man whose strong spirit, in its freedom and power, had cast its spell upon her mysteriously even before she had seen his face save in a dream, loved her, with eyes to look like that upon her and that mighty tenderness! Life was fulfilled. Let death come now. It was enough!

The moment, being supreme in its way, was not one to leave room for outward excitement, for flutter and trepidation. Anna rose now from her place with perfect calmness, and bent to take the little, laughing child by the hand, while she went to call the others together. Gregory had turned away slightly, and with his arms crossed over his breast was leaning hard against the rugged wall of the cliff, his head thrown back against it, his face set, his whole aspect as of some granite figure of heroic mould, carved there in relief. Anna heard a sound like a groan break from his lips, and turning back, with an irresistible impulse, laid her hand, light as a leaf, upon his arm.

From head to foot Gregory trembled then.

“Don’t,” he said sternly, under his breath.

“What is it?” asked Anna, confused at his sudden harshness.

“It is the end,” he said, with low distinctness and the emphasis of finality.

Then, only then, did Anna waken to perceive that what in that brief moment of joy she had taken for glory, was only shame and loss and undoing, unless smothered at the birth.

An inarticulate cry broke from her then, so poignant, although low, that the little child, pulling at her dress, began to cry piteously. She stooped to comfort him, gave him again the hand which she had laid on Gregory’s arm, then, turning, walked slowly away.

Gregory made no motion to detain her or to follow, but stood as she left him, braced against the rock. Anna gathered her little flock, and they hastened down the hill in a gay procession, with the waving branches of April bloom, and the merry voices of the children. Only Sister Benigna, as she walked among them, little Judith noticed, was white and still.

At nine o’clock that evening Barnabas Rosenblatt, working around the mill stables, was startled at the sudden appearance of Gregory, who passed him without speaking, as he went hurriedly into the stall and brought out his horse. The day had been followed by a night of brilliant moonlight, and Barnabas saw, as distinctly as if it had been day, that his face, usually firm and composed, was drawn and haggard to a degree. He started to speak to him, but an imperious gesture of Gregory silenced him. Without a word Barnabas therefore assisted him in saddling the horse, and then stood perplexed as he watched him gallop away down the valley in the moonlight.

Straight on through a narrow bridle-path which led by a short cut through the stretch of oak wood to the little hamlet of Spalding, Gregory galloped. He had reached the outskirts of the woods, and was in sight of the level meadows and the cluster of lights of the village beyond, when he suddenly perceived the figure of a man on foot approaching him from the direction of Spalding. A few steps more, and Gregory saw, with surprise and strange perturbation, that it was Keith Burgess. He reined up his horse and stood motionless, until Keith had reached him, and called out a greeting as he stood in the path, looking a pigmy beside the Titanic proportions of the horse and rider. The moonlight showed Keith more thin and wan than ever. He had returned to Fraternia once before this spring, in March, but, after a week, had been glad to go back to Baltimore, with some rather vague commission. His return at this time was wholly unexpected, even by Anna.

Keith had long since come to stand to Gregory for something like a concrete embodiment of his many disappointments and vexations, by reason of his lukewarm participation in his own purposes, his ineffective labours, and his continual draft upon Anna’s sympathies. As Gregory looked down upon him, thrown at this moment so unexpectedly in his path, a singular hardness toward the man came upon him, for he was hard beset by passion; and while he meant to have no mercy upon himself, he was not in the mood to have mercy upon another man, least of all, perhaps, upon Keith.

“You are going back to Fraternia?” he asked coldly, his tone striking Keith with chill surprise. The latter assented as a matter of course.

There was a moment of silence; Keith felt something sinister in the nature of it.

“Why should you go back there?” Gregory asked now, with the same careless coldness; “you have no heart in Fraternia or its purposes.”

Keith was stirred, and answered pointedly:—

“I have at least a wife in Fraternia, Mr. Gregory.”

Gregory looked at him a moment with a measuring glance, noting his wasted and feeble appearance.

“I suppose you do need nursing,” he said slowly.

Keith Burgess turned ashy pale. Was this wanton injury? Did Gregory wish to insult him? What did it mean? Gregory did not know himself. He knew only that, in the agony of that night, for he had fully resolved himself to see Anna no more, the sight of Keith Burgess worked like madness in his brain.

“Mrs. Burgess,” he said now, with the deliberation of strongly suppressed excitement, “is more highly endowed for great issues than any person I have ever known. It is almost a pity that she should not have freedom to use her powers in the greater activities to which she is fitted.”

Each sentence, cruel with all the cruelty which the climax of pride and passion could inspire, pierced the heart of Keith like a shaft barbed with steel. He stepped backward and leaned against a tree, breathing hard. The occult, mysterious quality of the moment’s experience to him was that he saw himself, distinctly and as if by an inexorable necessity, turning away from Fraternia, and going back by the way which he had come.

Without another word, Gregory tightened his rein and galloped on, out through the wood’s edge and so down to the plain. He did not see, in the high excitement of the moment, the figure of a man lurking stealthily among the trees at no great distance from where Keith stood. When the sound of the horse’s hoofs had died away, this figure stepped softly out from its shelter and passed along the bridle-path, peering inquisitively in the face of Keith as he still stood where Gregory had left him. But neither did Keith observe him, nor care who he was, and so he went on his way toward Fraternia. He looked back once or twice. His last look showed him that Keith had gathered himself together and was walking slowly away, in the direction from which he had come.

Keith walked blindly on, not knowing why he went, nor where he went, like a man who has suffered a heavy blow upon his brain, and moves only automatically without thought or will. On the outskirts of the village, near the railroad, he passed a barn, rickety and disused, but there was old hay in a heap on the floor of it, it offered shelter, and shelter without the contact with others from which he shrunk as if he were in disgrace, and fleeing for his life. Accordingly Keith went into this place, drawing the broken door together as far as he could move it on its rusty hinges, threw himself on the heap of hay, and slept until five o’clock in the morning. The one passenger train of the day passing through Spalding eastward was due at five o’clock. Keith was wakened by the long whistle announcing its approach, and came dizzily out into the chill and wet of a miserable morning.

The train slowed down as it neared the place where he stood. He swung himself upon it with the brief but tense nervous energy of great exhaustion, sank into a vacant seat in the foul, unventilated car, and was carried on, whither he did not know or care.

Anna, coming back from the walk to Eagle Rock, had gone to her own house alone. Here she spent the earlier hours of the evening in the deepest travail of soul she had ever known. The purity and unworldliness of all her life, both the life of her girlhood and that with Keith, had served to keep far from her familiarity with possibilities of moral danger. She was as innocent of certain kinds of evil as a child, and the thought that a temptation to a guilty love could assault her would, until this day, have appeared to her incredible. And now, in the fierce struggle of this passion, the only one she had ever known, she knew herself not only capable of sin, but caught at last in its power.

Not that for a moment she dreamed of any compromise of outward fidelity; such a thought she rejected with horror as inconceivable either to herself or to Gregory, whom she firmly believed to be far stronger than she. But the flaw in faithfulness had come already, beyond recall, beyond repair. Her whole soul moved toward this man, who had so long secretly dominated her inner life, with a mighty and overwhelming tide.

Her relation to Keith had been that of gentlest consideration, kindliness, and affection. More it had never been; and to-night it seemed as powerless to stay the flood of passion as a wall of sand built on the shore of an infinite sea by the hands of a child.

So Anna thought, so she felt. She went to the door of her cabin with this thought mastering her, driven by restlessness, and longing to feel the coolness of the night air on her face. For a moment she stood in her open door, and saw mechanically that the moonlight was shed abroad in the valley; she heard the voices of the men across the river singing in a strong, sweet chorus.

Then, suddenly, as if the words had been spoken in her ear, the thought came to her, “But Keith needs me; he needs me now!”

What was it? She did not know. She never understood. The sense was strong upon her that Keith was near her; that he was in some danger, and needed her.

Without pause to consider what she did, Anna flew down the river path and reached the mill breathless. The pond lay in the moonlight, motionless. The air did not stir. The mill was still and dark and deserted. The woods were dim with their night mystery. She looked down the valley, and up, and across the river, and everywhere was perfect peace, save in her own heart. Then in the silence she heard a step approaching from the direction of the woods below. She drew back hastily into the protection of the mill porch and waited for the steps to pass. Whoever it was paused for a little time above the mill, and Anna’s heart beat hard with a sense of dread and danger. Finally she heard the steps pass on, and when she returned to the road she recognized the unmistakable figure of the man now moving on in the unshadowed moonlight to the bridge above. It was Oliver Ingraham.

Slowly Anna returned to her own cottage, not daring to do otherwise, a heavy oppression on her heart.

Early in the morning, which was cold and rainy, Oliver was at her door, and she answered his summons herself, full of a vague, trembling anxiety. He scanned her face narrowly; it was careworn and hollow-eyed, for she had slept not at all.

In silence he handed her a letter, broken at the edges, and soiled with long carrying about. She glanced at the address. It was Keith’s, written by herself perhaps a month before; not a recent letter. She looked at Oliver in speechless perplexity.

“I found that lying on the ground down near Spalding last night,” he said, still eying her craftily, and with that hurried off, giving her not another word.

Anna went in, closed the door, and drew out the letter. It was unimportant, insignificant, simply an ordinary letter of wifely affection and solicitude, but one which had evidently been much read, being worn on the folds. Who could have carried it save Keith himself? Had he, then, been really near her the night before? Was he really coming?

Anna knew already that it was for this she longed supremely.

Noon brought to Everett a special messenger with a letter from Gregory, who brought with him also the roan horse ridden the night before to the county town, C——, and evidently ridden fiercely. At C—— was the bank where Gregory transacted all his business. This letter stated, first of all, that he had suddenly reached the conclusion that it was important and imperative that he should go at once to England in the interests of the colony. He should not return to Fraternia before sailing. He wished to empower Everett to act in his place during his absence, which would not be for more than three months.

Various items of business were enumerated, and the letter closed with this remarkable statement: “The funds furnished by Mr. Ingraham of Burlington have been returned to him with the exception of the five thousand dollars already used, which I shall restore at my earliest opportunity. This removes the obligation from us of counting Mr. Oliver Ingraham as one of our number, and I beg that you will signify to him my conviction that his continued presence in Fraternia is impossible. Do not allow him to stay a day if you can help yourself, and keep him under your eye while he remains.”

The following morning Anna sent for Oliver. Word had reached her that he was about to leave Fraternia. In the depth of her present distress and perplexity a thought which “had no form, a suffering which had no tongue” had arisen. Gregory, she knew, had left the village hastily that night under stress of powerful emotion, perhaps in a condition of mental excitement exceeding his own control. It seemed to her possible that somewhere on the way from Fraternia to Spalding he might have encountered Keith. The letter brought by Oliver indicated, she was more and more convinced, that he had really been on his way to her. If this were true, some event had interposed, something had occurred to hinder his coming. What could it have been, supposing him to have been but two miles away, save some mysterious, unthinkable effect of an interview with Gregory, if such there had been? It was no longer possible, no longer justifiable, to await events. She must herself discover all that Oliver knew, even if the discovery were to mean despair.

Alone, in her own cabin, she received Oliver. If Keith had been in Fraternia, or John Gregory, it would not have been permitted; but her intense anxiety and suspense overbore her usual shrinking from contact with the man, and Everett yielded to her wish to see him alone.

Oliver entered the cabin, noting its simple appointments with his characteristic curiosity. Anna pointed to a chair which he took, although she herself remained standing. Her face was as white as her dress, her eyes deeply sunken, her manner sternly imperious.

“You are going away from Fraternia to-day?” she asked, with swift directness.

“Yes,” said Oliver, nodding with his peculiar smile; “this precious demigod or demagogue—whichever you please—of yours, your imperial Gregory, has issued a ukase against me, in short, has done me the honour to banish me from the matchless delights and privileges of Fraternia!” The last word was spoken with a slow emphasis of condensed contempt.

“There is something really a little queer about it,” Oliver continued, in a different tone. “I am on to most of what happened between my father and Gregory, but I’ve missed a link now somewhere. You see, the governor, in a fit of temporary aberration, offered Gregory a magnificent contribution for his socialist scheme down here; but Gregory was pretty high and lofty just then, and, ‘No, sir,’ said he—I heard him, though he and the governor don’t know it—‘No, sir, I couldn’t touch your money. I am just that fastidious.’ The governor had been confessing his sins to Gregory, the worse fool he! It seemed that his money had come to him in a way that might make some men squeamish, and Gregory, oh, dear, no! he wouldn’t have touched those ill-gotten gains as he was feeling then—not with the tip of one finger.

“But the joke is,” Oliver went on, “that he had to come to it. Oh, yes; he got down on his marrow bones to the governor here about three months ago, and wrote to him that he had reconsidered the matter, and saw his mistake,” and Oliver gave a low chuckle; “so the governor had to come down with the lucre, more or less filthy as it was, and I don’t think he was quite so much in the mood for it either as he was at the first, to tell the truth. But he sent it all the same, and sent me with it, don’t you see? I came as the saviour of Fraternia, although I have never been so recognized. The whole town has been run the last month or two on Ingraham money, and it seems to have greased the wheels about as well as any other money, for all I see. But now comes the unexpected! Off goes Gregory to England, sends back the governor’s check, so I hear from Everett, and kindly writes me to take myself off. What brought him to that is what I don’t quite see through yet.”

“I have no doubt,” said Anna, concealing her dismay at Oliver’s malign disclosure with a manner of cold indifference, “that Mr. Gregory had good reasons for thinking it better for you to return to Burlington.”

“You’re right there,” retorted Oliver, quickly; “oh, yes, he had excellent reasons, the best of reasons. A man who knows too much is often inconvenient, you know.”

“Mr. Ingraham,” Anna asked hastily, apparently ignoring this insinuation although she trembled now from head to foot, “I am not interested in the business relations of your father and Mr. Gregory. It was not to hear of them I sent for you. You brought me a letter yesterday which I think must have been not long ago in my husband’s possession. I wish you to tell me if, on the night when you found this letter, that is the night before last, you saw my husband in the neighbourhood of Fraternia?”

“Oh, yes,” replied Oliver, as if it were quite a matter of course; “were you not expecting him?”

“Where did you see him?” The question came quick and sharp.

“Well,” said Oliver, reflectively, “you would like me to be exact, I suppose. Let me see, how shall I describe the place so that you will recall it—distinctly.”

There was a certain cold deliberation in the articulation of these words which gave them a sickening cruelty. They called up strange visions of dread and dismay to Anna’s tortured imagination.

“Speak more quickly,” she commanded, rather than asked, “the precise spot makes no difference.”

“It was near the edge of the woods, on the Spalding side, that I saw him first. The night was quite bright with moonlight, if you remember. I had taken a stroll down to Spalding myself for some of those little luxuries which Fraternia doesn’t furnish, and was on my way back when I first noticed Mr. Burgess. He was just striking into the path, there by that dead oak tree; you may remember it. I noticed it because it stood out so white in the moonlight, and it was just at the foot of it that I picked up that letter. I did not know that he had dropped it, nor whose it was until after I got home.”

“Undoubtedly false,” thought Anna; “you had not had the chance to read it, that was all,” but she did not speak. Oliver too was silent, as if he had answered her question, and was done.

“Please go on.” Anna kept her patience and control still.

“Oh!” exclaimed Oliver, as if surprised, “you want to hear more, do you? All right. I guess likely I’m the only man that can tell you, being the only witness, in fact.”

“Witness of what?” Anna cried importunately.

“Well, that’s it. That’s what I’ve asked myself more than once since that night, and I rather guess as good a description as I could give would be to call it a kind of moral murder; a moral murder,” and Oliver repeated the phrase as if gratified by the acuteness of his perception in forming it.

He watched her face closely, and beginning to fear from the bluish shade which tinged her pallor that Anna would soon be released from his power to torture by unconsciousness, hastily took another line.

“Oh, you’ve nothing to worry about, Mrs. Burgess, nothing at all. That was just a little fancy of mine, just my metaphorical way of stating things. It was a very simple little incident, nothing which need affect a man unpleasantly in the least. It just happened, you see, that Gregory was galloping down the path toward Spalding, and he met your husband, and they had a little talk together,—a mere quiet conversation for a few moments,—and Mr. Burgess seemed to change his mind about going to Fraternia just then, and turned back toward the village. That was all. I watched him a little, to be sure he didn’t need any help, you know, afterward. Gregory galloped right along; he was going to catch a train, I suppose, at C——, and that made him in something of a hurry, of course.”

“Why should my husband have needed help, Mr. Ingraham? Will you be good enough to explain yourself clearly, and in as few words as possible?” Anna spoke more calmly now, but her eyes were like coals of fire.

“Certainly, certainly. I cannot repeat Gregory’s language, not literally, but it seemed to cut Mr. Burgess up a good deal at the time,—at least I fancied so. That is what I meant by that little simile of mine awhile ago. He’s all over it now, of course. It was only a few words anyway. Just that Gregory said, in that short way he has once in awhile—Probably you’ve never heard him; he wouldn’t be apt to speak so to you,” and Oliver decorated the sentence with one of his most insinuating smiles.

“Mr. Gregory said—?” Anna asked, looking into his face with an unflinching directness, before which Oliver’s eyes wandered nervously.

“Why, he seemed surprised that Mr. Burgess should be coming back so soon, and he gave him to understand that a man like him, who was sick all the time, and not much of a Fraternian, either, was rather a drag on such a woman as you, don’t you see? and it might be fully as well if he should keep away and give you your freedom most of the time.”

“Did my husband make any reply that you heard?” asked Anna, huskily, this hideous distortion of unformulated traitor thoughts which had lurked in the background of her own consciousness confronting her now to her terror, and her heart doubly sick with the loathing of being forced to ask such information from such a source.

“He said you were at least his wife, I remember that. I guess that was about all. It struck me at the time that there was something in what he said, with all due respect for Gregory. He rules everything here, of course, though, I suppose,—even to the relations between husbands and wives.”

The last words were lost upon Anna.

“You may go now, if you please, Mr. Ingraham,” she said calmly. Her look and an unconscious gesture of dismissal were imperative, and Oliver, not daring to disobey, left the place without another word.

For two days Anna sat alone and in silence, waiting for the summons which she knew by a sure intuition must come.

Oliver’s story had been confirmed in so far that it had been learned that Keith had been seen in Spalding on the night of Gregory’s departure, and had been known to take an east-bound train on the following morning. Nothing further was discovered regarding his movements, and it was useless to try to follow and find him. Anna could only wait.

When the message came it was, as she had known it would be, urgent and ominous. Keith was in Raleigh; he was very ill; she must go at once.

Everything was ready, and with a strange composure and quietness as of one carrying out a line of action fully foreseen, Anna went on her journey, so like and yet so unlike that other journey to Keith which she had taken in her girlhood, ten years before. That had ended in their marriage. How would this end?

Reaching the city in the afternoon, Anna was driven with the haste she demanded to the address named in the message which had come, not from Keith himself, but from a physician. It was not that of a hotel, as she had expected, but of a boarding-house of very moderate pretensions in a quiet street. Even the small details of the place, in their cheap commonness, smote her heart. Was it in places like this that Keith had, after all, been living, instead of in the well-appointed hotels in which she had always fancied him?

The landlady, a kindly, careworn woman, plain of dress and of speech, received Anna with a mournful face, but forebore explanations, seeing that it was time rather for silence, and led her down a long corridor to the door of a dim and silent room.

There was a little stir as Anna stood in the open door; the physician came out and spoke to her, and she saw a nurse sitting quietly by a window. But Anna did not know that she saw or heard them; her sense took in only her husband, with eyes closed and the shadow of death upon his face, lying upon the strange bed in this place of strangers.

She was by his side and his hands were in hers, when presently he opened his eyes. Seeing her, a sudden light of clear recognition illuminated his face, a triumphant ray of joy and satisfaction. He tried to speak, but could not, but Anna felt the faint pressure of his hand.

Once more his lips moved, and Anna saw rather than heard the words:—

“Good-by, darling,” and with them the same look of ineffable love and peace. Then his eyes closed and he sank again into unconsciousness.

The physician, leaning over, said softly, “He will not rouse again. This was most unexpected. He has been unconscious since morning.”

The end came soon after midnight, unconsciousness falling into death without pain or struggle.

Of the days which followed Anna could never recall a distinct or coherent impression. Detached scenes and moments alone lived in her memory.

She knew that Everett was there and that they started for Fulham. Somewhere on the way Professor Ward met them, and Foster, the old family servant. Nothing seemed strange and nothing seemed natural; all passed to her as in a dream.

She was at Fulham; she remembered afterward that she sat in the library which Keith had longed for so, and his body lay beside her, below the mantelpiece where she had so often seen him lean. The old servants, hastily summoned for the occasion, went and came, and looked at her, she thought, with eyes of cold respect and mute reproach. Then Everett stood there, and she saw that tears were on his face as he looked upon his old friend, but she did not cry. Only when Everett turned toward her she said, very simply, with a motion of her hand which signified all that the place meant:—

“Keith gave his life—for me.” Then Everett had looked at her as if alarmed at what he saw in her face, and had gone out hastily and sent some woman to her, whom she did not want.

The incidents of the funeral seemed to pass by unnoticed. She remembered the moment at the grave when at last she fully realized that this was the end. Then she was at the Fulham railroad station, and Professor Ward had come to her on the train and had held her hands strongly in his, and had said with urgent emphasis:—

“You must always remember that Keith’s physician and all his old friends believe that his life was prolonged rather than shortened by your living in the South. Do not for a moment dwell on the opposite thought.”

She had felt her dry lips tremble then and her eyes grew dim, but she did not speak. The train had moved out soon, and she knew that kind eyes watched her, but she could not meet their look.

Of the journey down into the West to her mother that night she remembered nothing, save that the incessant jar of the train seemed to follow in a rhythmic endless repetition the familiar refrain of the old passion hymn,—

There is a time when religion is only felt as a bridle that checks us, and then comes another time when it is a sweet and penetrating life-blood, which sets in motion every fibre of the soul, expands the understanding, gives us the Infinite for our horizon, and makes all things clear to us.—Lacordaire.

On the quiet street of the hill town of Bethlehem stands the quaint and ancient building set apart in the Moravian economy as the Widows’ House.

In the interior of the old stone house, with its massive walls and rows of dormer windows, are wide, low-ceiled halls, and sunny, sweet-smelling chambers, clean and orderly, chaste and simple, as those of a convent. Here in mild monotony and peace the women of the “Widows’ Choir” live their quiet life, and here in September we find Anna Burgess, who had fled to this haven of her mother’s abiding-place, as to a sanctuary.

The evening was warm, and the windows of Gulielma Mallison’s room were open to the sunshine and the sweet air. Flowers blossomed in the deep window-sills; the bare floor was as white as scrubbing could make it; the appointments of the room were cheerful and refined, albeit homely, and the atmosphere was that of still repose. By the window Gulielma Mallison sat knitting, her face beneath its widow’s cap calm and strong in its submissive sadness. Opposite her on the sofa lay Anna, each line of her face and figure expressing the suffering of a stricken heart. There had been months of slow, wearisome illness and of grievous mental suffering, in which her days had been a Purgatorio and her nights an Inferno; and now weeks of convalescence, which were bringing life back into her wasted frame, still failed to bring healing to her mind.

The mother’s fond eyes, glancing unperceived across her knitting, noted the listless droop of the long white hands upon the white dress, the marblelike pallor of the forehead from which the hair was so closely drawn, the hollow cheeks, the piteous sadness of the mouth, the glassy brightness of the eyes, fixed in the long, still gaze of habitual introspection.

“Surely,” sighed Gulielma Mallison to herself, as she had before a hundred times, “there is more than the bitterness of death in her face; widowhood alone to the Christian brings not such havoc as this. It is in some place of danger that her thoughts are dwelling. I should fear less for her if she could only speak!”

But Anna’s grief could not find its way to words. How could her mother, in her sober, ordered existence, her decorous and righteous experiences of life and love and death, comprehend what it was to live with shadows of faithlessness, even of blood-guiltiness, for perpetual company? For to Anna’s thought Keith had been driven to his lonely death by the hardness of Gregory, by words which had issued from the white heat of his passion for her, a passion unrebuked by her,—nay, rather, shared to the full. Was she then guiltless of her husband’s death?

Not for a moment could Anna divide herself from Gregory in responsibility for the action which Oliver had characterized as “moral murder.” Unsparingly just to herself, she bore to the very limit of reason all the fellowship which was imposed upon her by the mastery of a love so long lived in its unconsciousness and silence, so soon cut off, once perceived and acknowledged. It has been said that “all great loves that have ever died, dropped dead.” Anna’s mighty passion had been stillborn, slain by the words which had sent Keith on his dim way to death. For she had never doubted that Oliver’s rehearsal of the scene in the woods between Gregory and Keith had been substantially true. She knew there had been spiritual violence done, and her soul recoiled from the very strength and power which had once enchained her. Something of diabolical pride seemed to her now to invest even the austere morality of Gregory. He would have spurned a yielding to the weakness of the flesh, his moral fastidiousness would have made it impossible; but he fought the fire of love fiercely with the fire of pride, not humbly with the weapons of prayer. No shield of faith nor sword of the spirit had been his in the hour of temptation, for all his high ideals, but the sheer, elemental force of human will. He had conquered, or rather had grappled with, the one passion; but the very force by which he had conquered turned again and conquered him, and his very power became his undoing.

Beside this conception of Gregory which had now taken possession of Anna’s mind, Keith’s gentleness, his faithful, patient life, above all, the greatness of the silent sacrifice which he had made for her sake when he embarked on the Fraternia adventure, became sacred and heroic. She saw at last what his leaving his normal life had been; she believed, as she had said to Everett, that he had literally given his life for her, and the sense of his devotion, so little understood, so scantily recognized, wore ceaselessly at her heart. Her one drop of balm was the memory of Keith’s last smile of triumphant love and faith; the bitterest drop in her Cup of Trembling that not one last word had been given her to show her by what paths his soul had fared, and whether thoughts of peace had lightened his sufferings. Having loved her, he had loved her to the end,—this only she knew. His faithfulness had not failed.

Words which her father had spoken to her shortly before his death, vaguely comprehended at the time, haunted her now, “With greatness we have nothing at all to do; faithfulness only is our part.”

If only she had earlier discerned their meaning!

Such shape did these two men take to Anna now; the one who had moulded all her outward life and touched her inner life hitherto so faintly, the other who had mastered her in her innate longing for power and freedom, and controlled her inner life for many years: Keith seemed to her now like some spirit of gentle ministration, humble, faithful, undefiled; Gregory, like some proud spirit, even as Lucifer, son of the morning, who had said, ‘I will ascend into heaven,’ but who had been brought down to hell, dragging with him all that was highest and holiest. And she had thought him so different! Like another, her heart would cry out:—

Once, some weeks earlier, there had come to her a brief note from Gregory, written soon after his return to Fraternia. It said only:—

“I have sinned deeply, against God; against him; most of all against you. I cannot even venture to ask you to forgive. I can only say to you, the penalty is wholly mine to bear. You are blameless.”

Having read the note, Anna threw it into the fire, and wrote no word in return.

And for herself—?

There was no softness of self-pity in Anna’s remorse. Dry and tearless and despairing, she saw herself, after long years of spiritual assurance, of established and unquestioned righteousness, overwhelmed at last by sin; not by the delicate and dainty and inconclusive discords which religious experts love to examine and analyze, but by a gross ground-swell of primitive passion, linking her with men of violence and women of shame.

Looking back upon her girlhood, Anna thought with sad self-scorning of her young desire for “a deeper sense of sin.” It had come now, not as the initial stage in a knowledge of God, and of her relation to him, but as a tardy revelation of the possibility of her nature, undreamed of in her long security. The cherished formulas of the old system, its measure of rule and line applied to the incalculable forces of the human spirit; its hard, inflexible mould into which the great tides of personal experience must be poured, seemed to lie in fragments about her now, like wreckage after a storm. She remembered that Professor Ward had once spoken to her of her inherited religious conceptions as terrible in their power to mislead, to deceive the heart as to itself; she saw the danger of a belief founded not on infinite verities, but on a narrow mediÆval logic. She knew sin at last, and knew that it was not slain in the hour of spiritual awakening.

She thought of the night preceding her union with her father’s church, and the recoil of nameless dread with which she had seen passing under her window the village outcast whom she supposed to be incredibly guilty and cut off from fellowship with all who, like herself, were seeking God. And it was that very night that she had first dreamed of the mighty personality, the embodiment of power and greatness, which she had thought to find in Gregory. Though late, she now clearly perceived that in no human being could that ideal of her dream find full manifestation.

Such thoughts as these were passing behind the pale mask of Anna’s pain-worn face, which her mother’s eyes were watching. The impress of suffering which they gave was hard to see, and a long involuntary sigh escaped Gulielma Mallison’s lips.

Anna looked up with eyes as sad as those of Michel Angelo’s Fates.

“Mother dear,” she said, her voice strangely dulled from its former clear cadence, “why do you sigh? Do I make you unhappy?”

“I cannot comfort you, Anna Benigna,” said the mother, sorrowfully. “It is for that I sigh.”

“No,” Anna said slowly, her eyes falling again from her mother’s face; “you cannot do that, no one can. No one lives who can comfort your child, mother.”

“I have often thought, Anna, that you may have suffered,” the mother ventured almost timidly, “as many others have, from the sad mistakes so common to people who regard the Christian life and the married life as ends, instead of beginnings.”

Gulielma noticed a slight quickening of interest in Anna’s eyes, and went on thoughtfully, with her simple philosophy of life:—

“To read the books that are written, and to hear the things that are said, young people can hardly help supposing that when they become Christians they will know no more of sin, and when they are married they will have only joy and perfect union. To my way of thinking, these wrong ideas are responsible for a great deal of needless unhappiness. The Christian life is really a school, with hard discipline and harder lessons. As for marriage—”

“Well,” said Anna, as her mother paused, “as to marriage?”

“It may be a crown,” said Gulielma, slowly, “but it is sure to be in some measure a cross. It is a testing, a trial, a discipline, like the rest of life. Only, whether it happens to be happy, or happens to be hard, it is equally to be borne faithfully and in the fear of God.”

There was silence for a little space, and then a laughing voice in the street outside, called:—

“Mrs. Mallison!”

Gulielma rose and stepped to the window, looking out over the crimson and purple asters into the street. A young girl who stood there handed her up a letter.

“I don’t know whether it belongs to Mrs. Burgess or not. The address has been changed so many times, but the postmaster said I was to ask you.”

“Very well,” was the answer, and as Gulielma turned back, a letter in her hand, she found Anna sitting up, leaning upon her elbow, her eyes strangely eager. She held out her hand, not speaking, and received the letter. The upper line, which struck her eyes instantly, was her own name, and it had been written by Keith. She could not be mistaken. The mother’s anxious eyes saw every trace of colour ebb away from Anna’s face and lips, and then stream back until the faint flush rose to her forehead. She had not stopped to decipher the many addresses written below, crossed and recrossed by many pens, but, seeing her own name written by the dear dead hand, she pressed the letter hard against her heart and so lay a moment, silent.

Soon she looked up and met her mother’s eyes. A wistful, heart-breaking request was in her own, which she hardly dared to speak.

“May I be all alone, mother?” she asked faintly; “my letter is from him. It has gone wrong, but it has come to me, you see, at last. In the morning I will see you. I will tell you then—all.”

In another minute, the door quietly closing, Anna found herself alone. Breaking the seal, she saw that the letter had been written three days before Keith’s death. An error in the original address, doubtless due to his exhaustion, had sent it far astray. The letter said:—

My own Anna,—I am here in Raleigh in a comfortable house, and with kind people, but I fear that I am very ill, and that the end is now not far away, and I want you as soon as you can come to me. I hope there will be no need of alarming you with a telegram, for I know that you will start as soon as this reaches you, and that will be in good time.

Do not think that this crisis is sudden and unforeseen. The physician in Baltimore told me plainly that I could have but a short time to live, and when I knew that I hastened to reach you as quickly as I might. It was for you only, Anna, in all the world that I longed. I believed that a few weeks of quietness were for us, not harder than we could bear, being together.

I think you will know that something turned me back almost at my journey’s end. John Gregory is honest, and he will tell you, if indeed he knows himself.

I do not know now what he said to me, I do not care to remember. Whatever it was it should have had no weight, being spoken, I know, under some strong excitement, but with it there went that strange, irresistible influence which Gregory exerts over me, and before which I was, or seemed to myself, powerless. I felt his will was for me to go back, not onward to you, and I yielded as if unable to do otherwise. I do not know, I cannot understand. I wish it had not been so, but rather for him than for myself, for I know that in his higher mood the thought of that night must be hateful to him.

I want to say now while I can that neither you nor he must look upon these events in a way to exaggerate or overemphasize their importance. I can see that you with your sensitive conscience and he with his great moral severity may judge over hardly. The difference to me has not been great. The end was very near, and is not hastened, and I shall see you yet before it comes. If I had not been weak I should have kept on my way. It was my weakness that sent me back rather than the outward compulsion.

I shall not want to talk of this when I see you, Anna, and so I will write to-day some things which have come to my mind this winter, for I have come to see many things in a new light.

John Gregory loves you. I do not blame him for that, nor wonder. “We needs must love the highest when we see it.” He is a man of great power and of the highest spiritual ambition. He is far nearer to you in ability than I; he could enter more deeply into your purposes and sympathize in fuller measure with your intellectual life. I believe you could have loved him, if you had been free, and that the union of two such natures would have been nobly effective for good. But I found you first, and with my fond dream that a sign was given me, won you for my wife. What then?

It fell to my part, although not of my own will, to give your life the shape it has taken. Sometimes I see plainly that I, a poor, pale, colourless fellow, wholly beneath both you and John Gregory, have maimed both your lives, so much stronger and more potential than mine could ever be.

And yet, Anna, for all this I cannot wish the past undone. I claim you wholly, heartily, for my own, and whatever the future may hold for you, and however the past has tried you, I believe in your love for me, and in the union of our spirits. My heart is at rest. My trust in you is absolute and beyond hurt or harm, and all the joy my life has known has come through you, my true and faithful wife. Never doubt this if you love me and would honour my name.

I wish to lay no hint of limitation or direction upon your future. Wherever you go, the dear Lord will go with you, and you will bring peace and consolation. You cannot go astray, nor your work be brought to naught, for God is with you. All that I have is yours without reserve or condition, beyond the few legacies I have named in a letter to my lawyer in Fulham. Use what was ours together freely wherever you will, whether to establish Fraternia, or in any line of effort which appeals to you. My keenest regret is that heretofore I have withheld from you what you desired. Forgive me. Those scruples look small and mean to me to-day.

Good night, my Anna—my Benigna, my highest grace and blessing.

Do not think of me as left comfortless. I am not alone. The King is at the door, and I hear his voice. He has even come in and will sup with me and I with him.

Let his peace be upon us both.

It was morning.

Entering her room, Gulielma Mallison found Anna fully dressed, standing in a stream of sunshine, with a brighter light than that of the sun upon her face.

“Oh, mother!” she cried, stretching out both her hands, “I can live. I can sleep. I can even cry now. Oh, these tears! how they have fallen like rain on a thirsty ground. See, mother; after all I am young still and strong. Feel my pulse, how full it is this morning, how strong and steady! I am at peace. The peace of God has come to me at last. Keith has comforted me.”

While we are not to forget that we have fallen, we are not always to carry the mud with us; the slough is behind, but the clean, clearly defined road stretches ahead of us; skies are clear, and God is beyond. We were made for purity, truth, and fidelity, and the very abhorrence of the opposite of these qualities bears testimony that our aspirations are becoming our attainments. The really noble thing about any man or woman is not freedom from all the stains of the lower life, but the deathless aspirations which forever drive us forward.... Better a thousand times the eager and passionate fleeing to God from a past of faults and weaknesses, with an irresistible longing to rest in the everlasting verities, than the most respectable career which misses this profound impulse.

It was Easter morning in Bethlehem. The stars still shone in the sky, and the little town lay in the hush and stillness which precede the earliest dawn, when suddenly, far off, like a whisper from the sky, the tones of the trumpets could be heard announcing the risen Christ.

Down through the quiet streets passed the solemn choir, the trombones blowing their deep-breathing melody in full and thrilling power. They stopped for a little space upon the bridge, and as their herald choral swelled and grew and filled the air, lights came out in visible response here and there throughout the sleeping town; and as they passed on down the streets, under the starlit sky, groups of men and women joined them in quiet fashion until the procession grew to a great though silent throng.

From the Widows’ House Gulielma Mallison and Anna came out and stood together for a moment in the dusk, watching the approaching stream of people as it moved forward in the gloom, and listening to the strains of music which called to their ears:—

“Rise, heart; thy Lord is risen!”

Soon the procession had reached their door, and, joining it with humble gladness, mother and daughter followed with the rest, greeting their friends and neighbours in simple, heartfelt kindliness.

The church was reached, and within it a solemn service was begun, and continued until the brightening of the eastern sky gave token of the sunrise. Then, as with one accord, and with the quietness of dear and familiar custom, the great congregation streamed out into the twilight of the early dawn, and, again forming in procession, moved forward up the winding hill to the cemetery, the choir with the pastor leading the way.

It was an early spring, and on the air was the thrill of awakening life. As she stood in the midst of the reverent throng now waiting, as if expectant, in the still churchyard, Anna felt the deep significance of the time as it had never been given her to feel it before.

Again the trombones poured forth their deep, yearning music in the ancient Easter hymn, the people singing in full chorus:—

Then followed, in slow, rhythmic chant, the noble words of the old Moravian liturgy:—

“This is my Lord, who redeemed me, a lost and undone human creature, purchased and gained me from all sin, from death and from the power of the devil;

“Not with gold or silver, but with his holy, precious blood, and with his innocent suffering and dying;

“To the end that I should be his own, and in his kingdom live under him and serve him in eternal righteousness, innocence, and happiness;

“So as he, being risen from the dead, liveth and reigneth world without end.”

With awe and joy came back the great volume of the response:—

“This I most certainly believe.”

“Keep us, oh Lord,” came then the prayer, “in everlasting fellowship with those of our brethren who since Easter Day have entered into the joy of their Lord and with the whole Church triumphant, and let us rest together in thy presence from our labours.”

The sun rose. The quiet God’s Acre was gilded with its misty beams, and the pale opal tints of the morning clouds reflected its glory. From the whole assembly burst forth the mighty hallelujahs of the hymn of praise, borne up by the deep diapason of the trumpets:—

“The Lord is risen. He is indeed risen.”

As Anna came out of the churchyard in the sunrise light, the peace of God was in her look, and the victory of the Resurrection morning shone in her eyes.

Hardly had she reached the street, when some one who had stood, awaiting her coming, put out his hand and greeted her. It was Pierce Everett.

“I saw you in the churchyard,” he said. “I wish to speak to you now, if I may.”

Anna welcomed him with quiet gladness, and they walked on together through the street, until they were beyond the crowd. Then Anna asked:—

“Do you come from Fulham?”

“Oh, no,” was the answer, “from Fraternia, or from what was Fraternia. My home is there now, and will be.”

“I did not know,” Anna said simply, not finding it easy to say more.

“There is little left there now of the old village or of the old life. Even the name is gone. They call it Gregory’s now.”

“I heard that the land had gone into the hands of the man who held the mortgage.”

“Yes, it is all gone now; all except the bit of ground that Mr. Gregory’s house stands on. The house and land we have kept for our own.”

“And there you live alone? Are all the others gone?”

“Nearly all. Some stay and work in the cotton mill, which has been enlarged, but the cabins are mostly used now by the coloured people who work the land, and are employed also in the mill.”

They were silent for a moment, and then Everett said:—

“We have heard that you are going soon to India. Is it true?”

“Yes, I go next month.”

“As a teacher?”

“Yes, partly, but I am also to be connected with a hospital. You know that is work which I have always liked, and this is to be a new hospital, bearing my husband’s name.”

Everett was silent, and Anna noted as she had not before the profound sadness of his face. Presently he looked at her with undisguised anxiety and asked a question which she had already begun to dread.

“Would you be willing to see Mr. Gregory before you go?”

A painful change passed over Anna’s face.

“I cannot,” she replied quickly; “it is not necessary. Is he here, Mr. Everett? Did he come with you?” and he noticed that she trembled and lost colour.

“No,” he answered very gently; “do not be troubled. He is not here. He will not seek to find or follow you. He will never leave Fraternia again.”

Her eyes questioned his face, for it was impossible not to detect some melancholy significance in his words.

“Mr. Gregory has received a severe injury,” Everett went on, as if in answer to her look. “It was a month ago. He was at work with the lumbermen up in the ravine. He was working midway of the river, which was unusually high, and he slipped and fell. Before he could get to his feet, a heavy log which was carried forward very swiftly by the current struck him with tremendous force and stunned him. We were near enough to reach him almost immediately, but the blow was on the spine, and it produced instantaneous paralysis. He will never walk again.”

Swift changes had passed over Anna’s face. In a softened voice she said:—

“How strange, how very terrible. Is he himself in other ways?”

“Perfectly. His mind was never clearer nor more active. I think he was never stronger in spirit. His body is a magnificent wreck, that is all.”

“And he does not wish to leave Fraternia?”

“No, I think nothing could suit him so well as our little stronghold in the solitude there. He does not mind the changes even, as one would expect. There is no bitterness. He is too large-minded for that. He acknowledges himself defeated, but his faith is still strong in his cause.”

“And how about yourself?”

“I am with him, heart and soul,” Everett answered, with strong emphasis; “nothing could take me from him now,—unless my presence ceased to be acceptable to him. He is, in spite of all that has passed of failure and defeat, my leader, and will be to the end. He is imperfect, being human; perhaps there are men least in the kingdom of heaven who are greater than he. Nevertheless, he is the bravest man I have ever known and the most sincere,—I would almost add, the humblest. So we live on together. He writes, I paint. Barnabas takes care of the house for us, and little Judith gives us the touch of womanhood we need to humanize us. An oddly assorted family perhaps, but we are satisfied.”

Anna listened with intense eagerness to every word, and found sincere satisfaction in the simple picture which Everett had thus drawn for her.

“And you have come to Bethlehem—” Anna hesitated, and Everett took up the word quickly.

“I have come all the way from Fraternia to ask you to go back with me and see John Gregory once more. He may live for a number of years, but it is hardly probable that you ever will see him again. He asks this as the greatest kindness you can do him, but he told me to say that, if you do not feel that you can go, he will still be perfectly sure that you are doing right.”

Something in the new note of humility, of submission, in the implied finality of the request, most of all the vision of the strong man in his present helplessness and acknowledged defeat, wrought powerfully upon Anna’s resolution.

They walked on silently for some moments, and then, turning abruptly to retrace her steps into the town, Anna said:—

“Yes, I will go with you. We will start to-morrow morning.”

It was late on Tuesday afternoon when they reached the valley. As they drove past the mill Anna gave a sudden exclamation of dismay as she caught a passing glimpse of a well-remembered figure which she least expected to see again in Fraternia.

“That could not be Oliver Ingraham,” she cried, “and yet no other man could look like him.”

“It was Oliver himself,” said Everett, smiling a little.

“How can it be? What has happened?”

“To begin with, I should tell you that Mr. Gregory succeeded in paying back, even to the last dollar, Mr. Ingraham’s contribution.”

Anna’s face grew brighter.

“I am glad,” she said.

“Yes, it was better, I am sure. But when this was accomplished a sense of compunction seized him toward Oliver for some fancied harshness in the past. Six months ago he sent for him to come if he would, and he appeared promptly. Mr. Gregory had conceived the idea that something better could be made of the man under right influences, and he determined to make the attempt.”

“Can you see any change?” asked Anna, still incredulous.

“It was rather hopeless for a time, only that he so evidently, for all his former spleen and spite, came to have a regard for Mr. Gregory, himself, approaching worship. But when the accident happened up in the woods and he saw Mr. Gregory helpless as he is now, it seemed to produce an extraordinary change in the fellow. He is softened and humanized in a marvellous degree. He can never be wholesome exactly to ordinary mortals. I sometimes think he is a snake still, but a snake with its poisonous fangs drawn. Yes, Mr. Gregory has made it possible to hope for good even from Oliver.”

“Only a great nature could have made that possible,” said Anna, musingly.

“Yes,” responded Everett, “and only then a great nature which had learned obedience by the things which it suffered.”

Anna was silent. This action of Gregory’s seemed very great to her, so wholly was it in opposition to his deep, instinctive antipathy toward Oliver. This man had seemed to embody in himself the evil forces which had entered Fraternia to destroy all of highest hope and purpose with which it had been established. And now Gregory had stooped to lift up, even to draw to himself, the man in all his hideous moral ugliness. Idealist as Anna had ever been, she saw in the nature thus revealed to her, in spite of failures and falls, a more robust virtue, a higher spiritual efficacy, than any of which she had known or dreamed. Again she found herself convicted of a too narrow and partial view of the working of the human spirit in her passionate withdrawal from Gregory in his time of temptation.

They had crossed the bridge now, and up the wooded slope Anna saw Barnabas and little Judith standing before the door of Gregory’s cabin. With simple and unaffected delight they welcomed her, and then suffered her to enter the house alone.

When the door had closed behind her, Barnabas came up quietly and took his place upon the rude steps which his hands had laid, and so sat, throughout the interview, as one self-stationed, to keep guard.

The interior of the cabin was as it had always been, with its rude furniture and its one picture, save that a broad and capacious couch covered with leather stood with its head just below the south window. On this couch, with a rug of grey foxskin thrown over his limbs, lay John Gregory, his head and shoulders propped high, his powerful hands lying by his sides with their own expression of enforced idleness.

He lifted his head as Anna entered, and leaned forward, raising his right hand in a pathetic salutation of reverence and gratitude.

Overcome by the new and more august repose of his face and by the pathos of his look and gesture, Anna crossed to where Gregory lay, and fell upon her knees by his side, her tears bathing his hand, although this she did not know.

For a space neither spoke nor moved. Then, as she rose from her knees, Anna said under her breath:—

“Life is greater than I thought.”

“Life is great,” returned Gregory, “because we live in God.” Then he asked humbly, all the fire of his earlier habit of speech quenched,—

“Do you then forgive me?”

“Yes, I have forgiven you,” she said softly. “I could not until, months after my husband’s death, a letter came to me from him, which had been lost long in reaching me. It was so noble, so great, so reconciling, that it sufficed for all—even that,” she added, with unsparing truthfulness. Then, even more gently:—

“It is altogether from him that I am here to-day. I could never have seen you again if it had not been for that letter.”

“Then I owe to him the greatest mercy of my life,” said John Gregory, solemnly, “and it is fitting that I should. He was a gentler man than I, a better man. I did not rightly appreciate him when he was among us.”

“He had no noisy virtues,” Anna said. “I think none of us perceived fully what he was until he was gone.”

Then with great delicacy she told Gregory all that the letter had brought of reconcilement, and especially the word to him. He heard it in brooding silence, and his face grew very calm.

“I wanted you to know,” Gregory began after a long pause, “that my feeling toward you has not been evil or base or wholly selfish. From the time I first saw that picture,” and he pointed to that above the fireplace, “you became to me a kind of religion. You stood to me for the absolute purity of my ideal, untainted by self and sin and even sorrow. That picture gave you to me as a virgin soul in the first dawning of a great and noble expectation. It was a picture which a Galahad might have worshipped. But alas! I was no Galahad.

“I was bringing the picture back to this country, and it happened, although you never knew it, that I crossed on the same ship with you.”

“How could it have been,” cried Anna, “that I never saw you?”

“I was with my East London people in the other part of the ship. But I used often to see you with your husband and with the many friends who always made a circle about you, and I fancied I saw a change in your look,—a change which betokened a gradual dimming of your higher vision, a fading of your ideal. I thought the people about you were changing you to their own likeness in some degree, and the thought haunted and disturbed me more than I had a right to let it.

“I came to Fulham with the picture, which I had promised to return to Everett. When I reached his house late in the evening, his mother received me and told me that he and ‘all the world’ were at a great reception at your house. She further told me that your husband’s mother had confided in her her hopes and her confidence that a new era of social leadership was now before you, and added that you were indeed already quite ‘the fashion’ in Fulham’s aristocratic circle.

“I had hardly an hour in Fulham—hardly a moment to reflect. I acted on my impulse and sought you and called you out from your brilliant company. You know what I said. My motive was pure, I think, whether the action were well judged or ill. When I saw you before me in that brief interview, in your loveliness, and in the docility which underlay your frank and candid joy, a strange impulse arose in me to gain some spiritual control over you, to have an essential influence over your thinking and to direct your development and your activity as I believed would be noblest and best.

“Naturally I had no opportunity to carry out such an impulse for a long period, but I think it never left me. When I saw you that night in the audience at Burlington, I knew that you would go to Fraternia. I determined in my own heart that if it could be right, you should. There was no thought then or for many months that anything could arise between us which could impair our faith and duty. Indeed, I never knew myself that it was you who had wholly mastered me rather than I you, until that day on Eagle Rock. When I left Fraternia that night, I knew all—to the very depth. I understood the blindness and tyranny of my passion, and I left, meaning never to see you again. Benigna, I did not have it in my heart to do you wrong, least of all to do wrong to your husband. It was the suddenness of his coming before me, and the struggle I was myself undergoing, which threw me at the moment into a kind of still frenzy of evil impulse. Gladly would I have died to atone for it.

“Now, looking back, I almost think I can see that I was permitted, so far as my individual life was concerned, to reach some climax of pride and passion, that I might be brought low in my humiliation. Perhaps in no other way could I have learned the way of the Cross than through seeing the failure of my own strength, in which God knew, I see now, I had taken an unconscious pride.

“There is nothing left of it. No drop of the wormwood and gall has gone untasted. But I believe solemnly to-day in the forgiveness of sins, and rest in a good hope of salvation through our Master, Christ.”

Again silence came between them, a silence which was full of peace, and then, with something of his old abruptness, Gregory said:—

“And now you will tell me about your going to India. You are glad to go; so much I understand.”

“Yes,” Anna replied, “it is a great fulfilment. I have lived a whole round of life since I first felt the call to this service, and now I come back to it with a purpose and conviction even deeper than those which first inspired me.”

“Then the larger hopes of final destiny do not, in the end, weaken the missionary motive, you think?”

“Oh, no. That fear belonged only to the time of transition. The message I have now is a far mightier and a more imperative one than I had at first. I know something now of the reality of sin and its terrible fellowship, and at least far more than in those old days, both of law and of love. I have learned also a greater reverence for man as well as for God.”

“Yes,” he said quietly; “it is true. You have been in training for your work.”

“I am gladder than I can tell you,” continued Anna, “that I was withheld from going out on such a mission with the hard and narrow message which was all I had then to give. It was you, Mr. Gregory, who opened to me the great truth of the unity of the race, you who taught me to see that ‘redemption is the movement of the whole to save the part.’ I share the burden of sin and suffering with all my fellow-men, and I simply seek to lift that burden so far as I may where it presses most sorely. Can there be any doubt that this is where Christ is not known,—among pagan nations?”

John Gregory thought for a moment before he replied. “I believe you are right,” he said finally. “The needs there are grosser than here, and they are actual and intolerable; inherent in the system, not artificial. You have the gift of high ministry. You used it without stint for our people here in Fraternia, but the issues were inadequate to your powers; for the conditions were, after all, abnormal, being produced voluntarily rather than by necessity.”

“Then do you feel, Mr. Gregory, that the message of brotherhood, of equality, cannot be spread by such means as we tried in Fraternia?” Anna asked timidly, and yet without fear.

“I believe that such isolated, social experiments, for many years at least, will be as ours has been, premature and ineffective. They are symptoms rather than formative agencies. They have significance as such, but are otherwise unproductive.

“I have not learned this lesson easily,” he added with a faint return of his rare smile, and the swift, strong gesture with which he had always been wont to dash the hair from his forehead. Anna knew without words that in the fall of Fraternia his dearest hopes, his most cherished plans, and highest pledges had fallen too. It was not necessary to open the old wound that she should know his pain.

“There are more steps between the clear perception of a condition and the application of remedial measures than I supposed before I started our colony here. I was in a hurry, but God seems to have plenty of time. There must be years, generations, perhaps—I sometimes fear it—centuries still of education and training before men understand that they are not created oppressors by the grace of God, nor oppressed by the will of God. I read this the other day,” he continued, taking a book from the table beside him; “it will show you what I mean: ‘When a man feels in himself the upheaval of a new moral fact, he sees plainly enough that that fact cannot come into the actual world all at once—not without first a destruction of the existing order of society—such a destruction as makes him feel satanic; then an intellectual revolution; and lastly only a new order embodying the new impulse.’

“That is good,” he commented, laying the book down, “but what is said there in a few sentences may, in actual fulfilment, require several centuries.”

“It is hard to wait,” said Anna.

“Yes, it is hard,” Gregory repeated, his eyes resting on her face with that sympathetic response to her thought which, she was startled to find, could still stir the old warm tremor in her heart; “but I can wait, can’t you? You can if you believe, as we are bound to believe, in a ‘divine event toward which the whole creation moves.’ I believe, I thank God, also, that, unworthy and powerless as I am in this marred soul and destroyed body of me, I can still hope, still work, still greet the unseen and expect the impossible.”

They talked long, and Anna rose at last to go.

“Oh, you will be leaving now!” John Gregory cried, as if he had forgotten that she did not belong to Fraternia.

“Yes,” Anna said gently, “I am to return to Spalding in an hour for the night, and I start home from there in the morning.”

“Yes,” he said, “that is right. You must go;” but with the thought all colour left his face, and his breath came hard and fast. She saw the physical change in him then. She had hardly seen it before.

“Can I help you? Can I bring you anything you need?” she asked quickly.

He pointed to a glass on the mantel, and said, smiling faintly:—

“It is so new to make others wait on me. It is not quite easy to lie here and submit to be served,—even by you, Benigna.”

As she brought him the glass, the simple act of service bore with it a peculiar power of suggestion and produced upon Anna herself an effect far beyond its apparent importance; for, as she thus served Gregory in his helplessness, a wave of yearning compassion and pure womanly tenderness broke over her heart. He would lie here for years, perhaps, prostrate, defeated, suffering, and she who had so loved him would go her way and leave him alone and uncomforted! Could it be right?

Before the imperious power of this question all other motives lost their significance.

Gregory had recovered from the sharpest effect of his agitation, and raised his eyes again, full of patient and quiet sorrow.

“Tell me,” she cried low and breathlessly, “shall I stay? I said I wished only to go where was most need of me. Is it here? Oh, I trust you wholly now, John Gregory! If you need my service, I will serve you while we both live.”

Then, as they faced each other with looks of solemn question, Anna saw into the depth of the man’s strong spirit, and she was prepared for what would follow.

“That might have been,” he said very slowly, and as if he were pronouncing his own doom, “even that unspeakable joy; but I myself, my child, made it impossible. Do you no longer see the great gulf fixed between you and me?”

He was holding both her hands now, and his own were firm and steady, but his face reflected the stern agony of the moment, while that of Anna was white as death. A throbbing silence filled the room, and all the air seemed to vibrate with the fierce pulsations of their hearts, for in both the cry arose that their punishment, self-inflicted, was greater than they could bear.

Then calmness fell, for as with one consent their eyes met again, and each perceived the light of a final spiritual conquest, and the shadow of an ultimate renunciation.

Again, as once before, John Gregory said, “It is the end,” and thus, most quietly, they parted.

It was evening when Anna left Fraternia. As the road entered the woods where the valley widened to the plain, she turned and caught a last glimpse of the solitary light which shone from the lowly house on the river’s farther side.

Through all the years and changes which remained to her, never did Anna lose the vision of that light, shining apart in the high valley. But John Gregory she never saw again.