Immediately upon the destruction of the chapel, two things happened. The first, was a visit from Mr. Hermon Worcester. Nothing could have been more unexpected; and when Bayard, coming into his lodgings one dreary afternoon, found his uncle in the bony rocking-chair, the young man was much moved.

Mr. Worcester, not untouched by the sight of his nephew’s emotion, held out an embarrassed hand. Bayard took it warmly. He had learned the lesson of loneliness so thoroughly, that he was ill prepared for the agitation of this little, common, human incident.

“You are ill, Manuel!” cried the elder man. “Good heavens, how you have changed! I had no idea—You should have told me!” he added, with the old autocratic accent. “I ought to have been informed.... And this is how you live!”

Hermon Worcester looked slowly about him. His eye fell on the paper screen, the mosquito-net portiÈre, the iron angel on the stove, the hard lounge, the old carpet, the stained wall-paper; he scrutinized the bookcase, he glanced at the Saint Michael. When he saw the great Christ, he coughed, and turned his face away; got up uneasily, and went into the bedroom, where he fell to examining the cotton comforters.

“At least,” he said sharply, “you could have sent for your own hair mattress! Nobody has slept on it, since”—

He broke off, and returned to the skeleton rocking-chair, with an expression of discomfiture so serious that Bayard pitied him. He hastened to say:—

“Oh, I have done very well, very well indeed, Uncle. A man expects to rough it, if he chooses to be a home missionary. Give yourself no concern—now.”

If there were an almost uncontrollable accent on the last word, Mr. Hermon Worcester failed to notice it. Something in that other phrase had arrested his Orthodox attention. A home missionary? A home missionary. Was it possible to regard this heretic boy in that irreproachable light?

To the home missions of his denomination Mr. Worcester was a large and important contributor. Now and then an ecclesiastical Dives is to be found who gives a certain preference to the heathen of his own land before those of India, Africa, and Japan; Mr. Worcester had always been one of these illuminated men. Indeed, Japan, Africa, and India had been known to reflect upon the character of his Christianity for the reason that his checks were cashed for the benefit of Idaho, Tennessee, and the Carolinas.

To this hour it had not occurred to Mr. Worcester that the heathen of Windover could be properly rated as in the home missionary field. Even the starving pastors in the northern counties of Vermont might have gratefully called for yearly barrels of his old clothes; but Windover? Why, that was within two hours of Boston! And, alas, the Vermont ministers were always “sound.” In Idaho, Tennessee, and the Carolinas, where was a corrupt theology to be found?

But that phrase had lodged in some nick of Mr. Worcester’s mind; and he could no more brush it off than one can brush away a seed out of reach in the crevice of a rock. He regarded his nephew with a certain tolerance, warmly tinged by compassion.

“The boy is a wreck,” he said to himself. “Manuel will die if this goes on. He might have expected it. And so might I.”

The old man’s face worked. He spoke, crossly enough. Bayard remembered that he always used to be cross when he was touched.

“What’s to happen now? Ready to give it up, Manuel?”

“I am ready to begin all over again,” replied Emanuel, smiling.

His voice had the ring that his uncle knew too well; when he was a little fellow, and bound to do a thing whether or no, he spoke in that tone, and always with that engaging smile.

“Who pays for this phoenix?” asked the man of business brusquely. “I passed by your place. It is a fine heap of ashes. A curious sight I saw there, too. That sign you hang out—those four words.”

Bayard nodded.

“It is a pleasant accident. The department says it is almost unprecedented. Oh, we shall crawl up somehow, Uncle! I don’t feel very anxious. The town hall is already hired for temporary use. There is great excitement in the city over the whole affair. You see, it has reached the proportions, now, of a deadlock between the rum interest and the decent citizens. Our treasurer is circulating some sort of a paper. I think he hopes to collect a few hundreds—enough to tide us over till we can float off. I don’t know just how it is all coming out. Of course we can’t expect the help that an ordinary church would get in a similar trouble.”

“I’m glad if you recognize that fact, Manuel,” replied Mr. Worcester uncomfortably. In his heart he was saying, “The boy has his mother’s splendid Worcester pride. He’ll perish here, like a starving eagle on a deserted crag, but he won’t ask me!”

“You need a new building,” observed Mr. Worcester, with that quiet way of putting a startling thing which was another Worcester quality. “You seem to have made—from your own point of view, of course—what any man of affairs would call a success here. Of course, you understand, Manuel, that I cannot approve of your course. It has been the greatest grief of my life.”

Bayard hastened to observe that his comprehension of this point was not limited.

“From your point of view, not mine, Manuel, I should, as a man of business, suggest that a new building—your own property—something to impress business men, you know; something to give material form to that—undoubtedly sincere and—however mistaken—unselfish, religious effort that you have wasted in this freezing hole.... I wonder, Manuel, if you could put the draughts on that confounded box-burner with the angel atop? I don’t know when I’ve been so chilly!”

Bayard hastened to obey this request, without intimating that the draughts were closed to save the coal. This species of political economy was quite outside of his uncle’s experience, and yet, perhaps, the man of business had more imagination than his nephew gave him credit for; he said abruptly:—

“Look here, Manuel, I’ve got to get the seven o’clock train home, you know, and I’d best do the errand I came on, at once. You know those old Virginia mines of your mother’s? There was a little stock there, you remember? It went below zero. Hasn’t been heard of for twenty years. But it remained on the inventory of the estate, you know. Well, it’s come up. There’s a new plant gone in—Northern enterprise, you know—and the stock is on the market again. There is only a trifle, a paltry two thousand, if well handled. It’s yours, you see, whatever there is of it. I came down to ask if you would like to have me force a sale for you.”

“Two thousand dollars!” cried Bayard, turning pale. “Why, it would almost build me—at least, it would furnish a new chapel. We had about so much of inside property—library, piano, pictures, settees, hymn-books, and all that—it is all a dead loss. Unfortunately, Mr. Bond had never insured it—we were so poor; every dollar tells!”

“Then he was a very bad man of business for a church—for a—missionary officer!” cried Mr. Worcester irritably; “and I hope you’ll do nothing of the kind. You could spend that amount on your personal necessities inside of six months, and then not know it, sir! You are—I hope, Manuel,” sternly, “that you will regard my wish, for once, in one respect, before I die. Don’t fling your mother’s money into the bottomless pit of this unendowed, burnt-out, unpopular enterprise! Wait awhile, Manuel. Wait a little and think it over. I don’t think, under the circumstances,” added Mr. Worcester with some genuine dignity, “that it is very much to ask.”

“Perhaps it is not,” replied Bayard thoughtfully. “At least, I will consider it, as you say.”

Four days after, an envelope from Boston was put into Bayard’s hand. It contained a typewritten letter setting forth the fact that the writer desired to contribute to the erection of the new chapel in Windover known by the name of Christlove, and representing a certain phase of home missionary effort—the inclosed sum. It was a bank draft for twenty-five hundred dollars. The writer withheld his name, and requested that no effort be made to identify him. He also desired that his contribution be used, if possible, in a conditional character, to stimulate the growth of a collection sufficient to put the building and the mission behind it, upon a suitable basis.

The following day Mr. Worcester sent to Bayard by personal check the remnant of his mother’s property. This little sum seemed as large, now, to the Beacon Street boy, as if he had been reared in one of the Vermont parsonages to which his uncle sent old overcoats; or, one might say, as if he had never left the shelter of that cottage under the pine grove in Bethlehem, where his eyes first opened upon the snow-girt hills. Self-denial speaks louder in the blood than indulgence, after all; and who knew how much of Bayard’s simple manliness in the endurance of privation he owed to the pluck of the city girl who left the world for love of one poor man, and to become the mother of another?

Bayard had scarcely adjusted his mind to these events when he received from Helen Carruth this letter:—

Bayard laid down the letter. The room grew black before his starting eyes.

“There is another man,” he thought. “She is engaged. She cannot bear to tell me.”

Sparks of fire leaped before his eyeballs. Black swung into purple—into gray—light returned; and he read on:—

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It was early afternoon of the next day, when Helen, standing in her window to draw the shades, glanced over automatically at the third-story northwest corner front of Galilee Hall. The room had long since been occupied by a middler with blue spectacles and a peaked beard; a long-legged fellow, who was understood to be a Hebrew scholar, and quite Old School, and was expected to fill a large parish without offending the senior deacon. Privately, Helen hated the middler. But the eye that had learned to wander at sunset across the Seminary “yard” to the window blazing in gold and glory, had slowly unlearned the lesson of its brief and pleasant habit. Even yet, on blue-white winter days, when life stood still to freeze on Cesarea Hill, Helen found herself drearily looking at the glittering glass—as one looks at the smile on a face from which the soul has fled.

It was still many hours to sunset, and the early April afternoon fell gustily and gray upon the snows of Cesarea. It was not a sunny day, and Cesarea was at her worst. Helen idly watched a figure splashing through two feet of slush “across lots” over the Seminary grounds from the Trustees’ Hotel.

“A post-graduate,” she thought, “back on a visit. Or, more likely, a minister without a pulpit, coming to Cesarea after a parish, or places to supply. Probably he has seven children and a mother-in-law to support. If he’s ‘sound’ he’ll come to Father—no—yes. Why, yes!”

She drew suddenly back from the window. It was Emanuel Bayard.

He waded through the slush as quickly as so tired a man could. He had walked from the station, saving his coach fare, and had made but feint of being a guest at the hotel, where he had not dined. He was not quite prepared to let Helen know that he had lunched on cold johnny-cake and dried beef, put up by Mrs. Granite in a red cotton doily, and tenderly pinned over by Jane with a safety-pin.

He lifted his eyes to the gloomy landscape for illumination, which it denied him. He knew no more than the snow professor what he should do, what he should say, no, nor why he had lapsed into this great weakness, and come to Cesarea at all. He felt as if he might make, indeed, a mortal mistake, one way or the other. He pleaded to himself that he must see her face once more, or perish. Nature was mightier than he, and drove him on, as it drives the strongest of us in those reactions from our strenuous vow and sternest purpose, for which we have lacked the simple foresight to provide in our plan of life.

There was a new snow professor, by the way, comfortably melting before the pump beside the Academy commons. He had been considered sounder than any of his predecessors, and had been supplied with a copy of St. Augustine’s Confessions, which he perused with a corncob pipe between his lips of ice. A Westminster catechism ornamented his vest pocket. He was said to have slumped beautifully, when the thaw came.

Bayard shot a tolerant smile at the snow professor’s remains, as he came up the steps.

Helen herself answered his ring. Both of them found this so natural that neither commented upon this little act of friendliness.

The Professor was at his lecture; and Mrs. Carruth was making her final appearance at certain local Cesarea charities; principally, to-day, at the Association for Assisting Indigent Married Students with blankets and baby-clothes. Helen explained these facts with her usual irreverence, as she ushered her visitor into the parlor.

“If I had a fortune,” she observed, “I would found a society in Cesarea for making it a Penal Offence for a Married Man to Study for the Ministry without a Visible Income. The title is a little long, don’t you think? How could we shorten it? It’s worse than the Cruelty to Animals thing. Mr. Bayard?—why, Mr. Bayard!”

When she saw the expression of his face, her own changed with remorseful swiftness.

“You are perfectly right,” he said with sudden, smiting incisiveness. “You are more than right. It is the greatest act of folly of my life that I am here.”

He stood still, and looked at her. The despair she saw in his eyes seemed to her a measureless, bottomless thing.

“I had to come,” he said. “How could I let you go, without—you must see that I had to look upon your face once more. Forgive me—dear!”

Her chin trembled, at the lingering of that last, unlooked-for word.

“I have tried,” said Bayard slowly. “You won’t misunderstand me if I say I have tried to do the best I can, at Windover; and I have failed in it,” he added bitterly, “from every point of view, and in every way!”

“As much as that,” said Helen, “happened to the Founder of the Christian religion. You are presumptuous if you expect anything different.”

“You are right,” answered Bayard, with that instinctive humility which was at once the strongest and the sweetest thing about him. “I accept your rebuke.”

“Oh,” cried Helen, holding out her hands, “I couldn’t rebuke you! I”—she faltered.

“You see,” said Bayard slowly, “that’s just the difference, the awful, infinite difference. All His difficulties were from the outside.”

“How do you know that?” asked Helen quickly.

“I don’t,” replied Bayard thoughtfully. “I don’t know. But I have been accustomed to think so. Perhaps I am under the traditions yet; perhaps I am no nearer right than the other Christians I have separated myself from. But mine, you see—my obstacles, the things that make it so hard—the only thing that makes it seem impossible for me to go on—is within myself. You don’t suppose He ever loved a woman—as I—love you? It’s impossible!” cried the young man. “Why, there are times when it seems to me that if the salvation of the world hung in one scale, and you in the other—as if I—” He finished by a blinding look. Her face drooped, but did not fall. He could see her fingers tremble. “It was something,” he went on dully, “to see you; to know that I—why, all winter I have lived on it, on the knowledge that summer was coming—that you—Oh, you can’t know! You can’t understand! I could bear all the rest!” he cried. “This—this—”

His sentence broke, and was never completed; for Helen looked up into his face. It was ashen, and all its muscles were set like stiffening clay. She lifted her eyes and gave them to him.

“I do understand.... I do,” she breathed. “Would it make you any happier if you knew—if I should tell you—of course, I know what you said; that we can’t ... but would it be any easier if I should tell you that I have loved you all the time?”

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