In the autumn evenings Grandfather sat beside his stove in meditation. It was against his principles to permit himself too high a degree of physical comfort, but as the current of his blood ran less swiftly he drew unconsciously closer to the stove. As he had often sat here and ordered his life, so he was ordering now his departure from life. He dreamed sometimes of a burial such as the fathers had had, at midnight under the light of torches, with antiphonal singing and solemn tolling of bells, and with a procession of the Brotherhood of Zion and the Sisterhood of Spiritual Virgins.

Amos was at the pine table, now correcting the papers of the children in his school, now bent over his Latin manuscript. It seemed to him that his mind became less active and that the devil tempted him to dream when he ought to be at work.

To Grandfather there had been in the universe two stable realities, the existence of a wise and all-powerful Creator and the correctness of the Seventh-Day Baptist interpretation of the Creator's mind and works. Now in his old age he dwelt with increasing satisfaction upon a third reality, the divine appointment and fitness of Amos, on account of his faith and piety, to interpret both Creator and theology. He thought, as the weeks passed, less anxiously about Ellen, ascribing her placability to his own advice and to her better mind, rather than to the stern necessities of her case. She would, he believed, now that the dangerous influence of her father was removed, "come round."

One day he summoned a carpenter and went with him over the old buildings, measuring and inspecting. Here a wall needed strengthening, here a chimney rebuilding, here fresh plaster should replace the broken mortar of clay and grass. The sum required to put all in order was not large.

Sitting drowsily by the stove Grandfather peopled the quiet night with figures. He saw Saron filled; he saw men going after prayer to work in the fields and women in white filing in solemn procession to worship at midnight. They went joyfully, as he and Amos went sometimes to pray in the Saal. He heard above his little cottage heavenly songs issuing from the high matin room of Saron.

But the figures in his dreams were not those of departed saints. The face of the speaker in the pulpit who held an audience enthralled, not alone by his eloquence, but by the power of truth, was not that of Father Friedsam, but of Amos; the cowled and robed figure which was followed by adoring converts was that of Amos; the religious who knelt alone in the Saal at midnight praying for his people was Amos. It was mediÆval and strange, but it was real to the dreamer. It had all happened once, less than two hundred years ago—it might, if it pleased God, happen again.

But Amos, alas! had come to doubt his own strength, had come indeed to fear his own thoughts. As he bent over "The Mystic Dove" on this winter evening his face was drawn, the fingers with which he held his pen were icy. He was trying to translate a sentence which he believed praised the holy mystery of the sacraments, but his mind was not upon his work, and, spoken to suddenly, he started as guiltily as though Grandfather had looked into his heart and detected his disquiet.

"Our little girl is learning to submit herself," said Grandfather contentedly. "Matthew tells me so. That's the first lesson learned—quiet. She is like the noble Sister Anastasia whose pride was softened. Have you seen Ellen at any time?"

"Once," answered Amos without lifting his head. He spoke indifferently and bent more closely over his work, as though he had reached an important paragraph. It was the acting of a lie, for he thought of Ellen in school and at home and especially in the long evenings when it was supposed that his sacred task occupied his mind. He had been thinking of her when Grandfather spoke; for her benefit he was making a strange plan.

Last Sunday afternoon he had gone for a walk. Even then he had not been quite honest with himself, for he had pretended that his object was exercise, when deep in his heart he hugged a hope of seeing Ellen. An intense natural shyness and a consciousness of guilt forbade him Matthew's door. It was unthinkable that he should "go to see" Ellen!

Making a long dÉtour he had arrived at last in the woodland back of the Levis house and there waited for darkness to become complete, when he intended to go to the edge of the woods and look down upon the lighted windows and perhaps see Ellen's shadow moving back and forth.

The November evening was still and he had taken only a few steps into the woodland when he heard the sound of crying. Ellen herself was no more tender-hearted and he at once moved forward rapidly, then stood still, trying to decide upon the direction from which the sound came. He could now hear nothing; perhaps his footsteps on the dry leaves had betrayed his approach. Then he heard the sound again nearer at hand. It was not the whimper of a trapped animal, it was the smothered sobbing of a human being. He went forward swiftly. Then again he paused. The low western sun cast a single level beam through the clouds; the light fell upon Ellen, a mournful figure in a black shawl upon a stump, Ellen alone in the twilight, Ellen unreconciled to her bereavement, Ellen changed and forlorn.

"It is I. Can I help you, Ellen?" he asked breathlessly.

Ellen sprang to her feet, her black shawl trailing.

"Oh, is it you?" She drew a long breath of relief. Amos was negligible—she had thought that it was Matthew! It made little difference whether Amos observed her woes.

"You can persuade them to let me go away," she said despairingly. "I haven't anything to live for, I'm all alone." Then she recovered herself. "Please forget this. No one can do anything." She rubbed her eyes furiously with a wet handkerchief and pulled her shawl round her. "I hadn't any business to talk about it."

At once she walked rapidly out of the gloom of the woods into the brighter light and made her way, somber and forlorn, across the fields.

Amos took her place upon the broad stump. He saw her reach the kitchen door, he saw the light gleam. It was possible that Matthew and Millie were away—was she then alone, poor, poor Ellen? He would go down and speak to her further; he should not have let her go uncomforted, he who meditated upon religious matters, who translated holy books! But suppose that Matthew and Millie should return, Millie with her sharp, cunning eyes! Besides, he knew that he could not help Ellen, she would not listen.

Then, the devil tempted him. Grandfather's plan for her was a mistaken one, she would never bind herself to conventual life. In the Normal School whither he had gone to learn elementary Latin there had been many lady teachers, confirmed in singleness, faithful to their duties and to their various denominations, and useful to the world—it was not wrong to think of Ellen bound to education! He rose and went home, meaning to speak in her behalf.

But between the time of that bold intention and this evening, misgivings troubled him. If he were listened to he would be helping to send Ellen into the world. She wished to go farther away than the Normal School, farther away than Lancaster or Harrisburg, and about the safety of the world beyond he had grave doubts. She might even go to New York where, every one said, wickedness was rampant. There was no telling where she might not go!

Presently a solution presented itself. It was possible to learn much from books; he had gained all his information from that source, and from books he would learn about the present condition of the world. Before speaking to his uncle he would acquaint himself with contemporary writings and be governed by their character. In Harrisburg there was a State library from which he occasionally secured books by mail, and he had sometime ago announced to Grandfather his intention to apply there in person for a new volume. At Christmas, when school closed for a week, he would be his own master. When he had come to this determination his mind was easier and he was able to proceed with his translation.

His preparations for departure consisted of earnest prayer and the packing of a frugal lunch. When he found that he could conscientiously ask the blessing of God upon his undertaking his spirits rose. As for the material preparations, prices in city restaurants were high and wastefulness was wicked.

The day which he had selected dawned bitter cold; the fire in the cottage did not burn well and the pinched and blue countenance of Grandfather distressed him. But Grandfather would listen to no sympathy.

"My trials are small beside those suffered on this spot."

The landscape showed bleak and gray in the dawn; the lighted windows suggested not the cheerfulness of evening and of family gatherings, but unwilling rising in cold rooms, the breaking of ice in pitcher and bowl, the torturing operation of milking with stiff hands. Wheels creaked over the frozen snow, and horses puffed like chimneys. Amos was not warmly dressed; he had never, in fact, been dressed warmly enough to meet winter storms. Having climbed into the trolley car, he tried to restrain his tears while circulation returned to his frost-bitten fingers. He looked fully the part of a shivering Saint Francis. A traveling man, wrapped in a fur-lined coat, and cursing inwardly the luck which had kept him overnight in the village, stared.

"Who is he?" he asked the conductor; but the conductor, being busy with his fares, made no reply.

His was the first but not the last comment upon Amos that day. Entering the train at Lancaster he walked the length of the car to find a seat, and after him heads turned. Even persons who were familiar with Lancaster County's strange types looked startled; one or two impressionable women shivered.

"Do you suppose he's very wise or very stupid?" asked one woman of another.

"He's very handsome."

"Do you think so?"

"Yes, he's too handsome."

"I'll warrant he's the kind of a crank after whom women would travel in droves. Perhaps we'll have a new sect."

Amos heard no comments. He sat down and looked at the smooth farmlands, then at the river filled with floating ice, then upon the tall stacks and chimneys and into the heart of glowing furnaces. It was a bewildering world to which he was an alien. He was trained to be interested not in mechanical operations or in the achievements of science, but in the operations of the human soul. A famous saint had put into words, centuries before, Grandfather Milhausen's teaching. "Suppose that you had subtilty and learning enough to know all things, that you were acquainted with all languages, the courses of the stars, and all the rest—what is there in that to be proud of? The glory of man is to be faithful to God."

Catching a glimpse of the dome of the Capitol soon after he had left the station, he walked up a narrow street to the rising ground. Now that he was here he would not confine himself to the library, but would look about—this, too, might be a part of Ellen's world! It was nine o'clock and the sun gave a small measure of warmth. Squirrels ran up and down the tree-trunks and pigeons wheeled above his head. Their friendliness with the passers-by pleased him.

Then, abruptly, pleasure ended. He looked not down at the parked street, as Ellen had looked at first, but up at two groups of statuary newly placed on each side of the main entrance. Here, in broad daylight, fixed eternally and shamefully in marble, were human beings without clothes! He did not blush; his astonishment and incredulity were too deep. After a long stare he withdrew his gaze embarrassed. It was to escape the glaring nudities that he entered the bronze doors, on which were represented various worthies of the Commonwealth. He did not smile at the neatly collared gentlemen whose heads protruded like the heads of turtles; he found them vaguely an assurance of the stability of the world.

Once inside, he felt a measure of confidence. Upon his childlike mind the soaring dome, the painted walls made the same impression which they had made upon the mind of Ellen. He looked longest at the lunettes in a corridor which pictured the early sects and found at last his own. How beautiful was this quiet place and how intolerable the group without! Here, in Moravian, sounding his trombone from the tower, in pious Quakeress preaching to the savage, in Wissahickon mystic at prayer on the hillside, was nothing to hurt Ellen.

For an hour he wandered about, walking on marble stairways and thick rugs and letting his astonished vision rest on masses of color, the green of Penn's rich coat, the Admiral's scarlet robe, the blue sky. He had not known that such colors existed. Suddenly he apprehended dimly the beauty of the world, of trees and streams and the bodies of human beings. But they were all an obstacle between man and God!

He felt with sudden depression his own insignificance. He had seen in all his years no crowds of human beings, had been part of no large body of men, had had a share in no concerted movement. He knew in a general way the history of his State, but he was not of it; he taught the history of his country, but felt no thrill at sight of its flag. He read no daily paper, and in his religious weekly all the news of the world was censored and emasculated.

In the library he stood most astonished and confused. Shelves upon shelves of books, hundreds and thousands of books! He was confounded by their number and by the vastness of the world which they represented; he was embarrassed by the studious silence; he was frightened by the cool black eyes of a young woman behind the desk. To gain a moment's time, he stepped aside to look at an old map and at a framed and valuable proclamation offering ten thousand dollars for the arrest of the assassin of Abraham Lincoln.

At last he summoned sufficient courage to ask for "The Early Sects," and was told that it was at present out of the library.

"I wanted it for study," he explained. "I have sent for books from here."

"If you will leave your name and address we'll send it to you."

As he wrote his name on a card, his eye fell upon a row of books at the end of the desk whose bright bindings marked them as the modern works for which he sought. He thought it best to buy copies of his own; he was not a rapid reader and he wished to study them carefully.

"May I copy their names?"

"Surely!"

He looked at the titles in an uncritical spirit and took them as they came. The volumes belonged to the "Thinker's Library," a somewhat poorly bound, carelessly edited series of English novels and translations of other European novels and tales. It was a curious list which he transcribed—"Bertha Garlan," "Russian Stories," "Esther Waters."

He found at last in a store, where he had to thread his way among women buying laces and handkerchiefs and table linen, a corner where books were sold. The first two volumes on his list were on hand, "Esther Waters" was not to be had, but "Evelyn Innes" was suggested by the clerk as a substitute. Then, his bundle under his arm, he walked out. Now that his business was attended to, he would satisfy his still undulled curiosity. It seemed to him that the gaze of every passer-by sought his, and he was uneasy until he realized that his glance sought the eye of every passer-by. This fact discovered, he walked on looking straight ahead and holding his shoulders stiffly.

He came at last to the street with the park in the center running from the Capitol to the river. There stood large churches, and seeing a few women enter the most imposing, he entered also. He made no excuse for himself, though he knew that his uncle would not approve; an inspection of churches seemed a legitimate part of his expedition.

When with a single astonished glance he saw that the few worshipers were kneeling, he knelt also. He had not dreamed that anywhere but in the Saal men went to pray alone. He prayed now for the Kloster and for his uncle and for Ellen—poor little Ellen whose sobs he would never forget. It seemed to him that God spoke to him and told him that it would be right to help her to her heart's desire, and he sighed happily.

Then—it may have been the tinkle of beads slipping from finger to finger, it may have been a subtle ecclesiastical odor different from the odor of the Saal—he felt a sudden misgiving. He opened his eyes slowly and looked at the woman kneeling near by, who was not so absorbed in her devotions that she did not have a startled eye for her neighbor whom she believed to be some sort of very holy man. Next he saw the stations of the cross along the wall, and then the marble altar with its tiny, gleaming lamp. Whither, oh, whither had he come?

At once terrible words rushed into his startled mind—"popish images," "idolatry," "confessional." He rose and clutched his package and went out. In the vestibule he saw a woman performing what he took to be a slight ablution in a sort of basin—it removed his last lingering doubt. He fled, and the door closed noisily behind him, disturbing those within.

As he walked weakly toward the river, he realized that it was not altogether emotion which had exhausted him, but partly hunger. To one who was accustomed to the damp coldness of the Saal a meal out of doors, even on such a day as this, was tolerable and he sat down on a bench near the spot where Ellen and her father had paused hand in hand to look across toward Stephen's gray house. He, too, looked at it, but the lives lived there did not come within his experience and were not to be imagined.

When his lunch was eaten, he returned to the station to wait for his train and sat holding his package of books, and watching the ever-changing throng. All he saw had a bearing upon his errand, and he tried to picture Ellen among the travelers—not Ellen in her black shawl, but Ellen in her brown coat and tight-fitting cap, her Christmas gifts in her hands, all smiles and happiness. His day in the world had brought him to no final decision; Ellen's future still waited upon his reading.

For some reason unknown to him, the train waited for a long time upon a siding outside the city, and he could look directly through an opening in a high fence into the yard of an iron mill. Opposite the opening stood a lofty shed, apparently a vast store-house for finished products, in which cranes moved like gigantic men, lifting and laying down masses of iron and loading long girders upon cars. He watched, as he sometimes watched the farmers intent upon their work, the men who manipulated the enormous machines, and the men who came and went in the yard. Simply to live and work and not to think, what happiness in such a lot! But he reproached himself sharply for desiring the glory of the moon rather than the glory of the sun which was his. He had chosen the better part, or to speak exactly, it had been chosen for him. Let him be grateful.

He entered the gate of the Kloster after dark. Grandfather had lighted the brass lamp and sat by the stove asleep. On the stove were several pots with a fragrant steam escaping from under their lids. As Amos laid down his books on the sill outside, his conscience reproached him. But his motive was, he reminded himself, excellent.

Grandfather went early to bed on his hard cot in the next room, leaving Amos bending over the manuscript from which he had been separated for a day, and charging him not to work too late. When the old man's light breathing could be heard, Amos opened the door, brought in his precious parcel and with shaking, thrifty hands untied the hard knot with which it was fastened. He selected the book which was uppermost and laid the others in the drawer of his table. In the silence of the night he began to study the world into which he was to launch Ellen. Surely none of these authors had hitherto been read in a stranger spot! Close to the little cottage on one side crowded the graves of the dead, above it on the other rose the grim old buildings. All spoke, not of love, either good or evil, nor of the present, nor of life, but of the past and of the peace of death.

The book he had selected was the volume of Russian stories. He read an introductory paragraph which stated that the author gave a description of his impressions of the Russian-Japanese War, an event as dim to Amos as though it had taken place in 1904 B.C. instead of 1904 A.D. He was disappointed—he was not interested in war! But having begun he kept on. He had thought himself a slow reader, but he had read hitherto only the subtle abstractions of mystic writers, pondering as he went; he had never had before him such texts as these.

"Horror and madness!" The opening words were not reassuring. But he read on.

"I felt it for the first time as we were marching along the road—marching incessantly for ten hours without stopping, never diminishing our step, never waiting to pick up those who had fallen, but leaving them to the enemy that was moving behind us in a compact mass."

He blinked as though to clear his vision; then his pupils moved back and forth, back and forth.

"An hour passed, but the multitude still moved on, and the air and the distant, phantom-like ranks trembled as before. Again the burning heat pierced my body ... I was surrounded by a group of gray people; some lying motionless, perhaps dead; others sitting up and staring vacantly. Some had guns and resembled soldiers; others were stripped almost naked, and the skin on their bodies was so livid that one did not care to look at it. Not far from me some one was lying with his bared back upturned. One could see by the unconcerned manner in which he had buried his face in the sharp, burning sand, by the whiteness of the palm of his upturned hand, that he was dead, but his back was as red as if he were alive. And I saw—"

"What is this?" whispered Amos. But he read on and on until headless men surrounded him and a sea of blood seemed rising to engulf him.

He finished with a dying light and a body aching cruelly with cold. The fire had gone out; there echoed about him the mysterious crackling sounds of a bitter night. He rose and stood in the darkness, appalled by the things he had read. Was this the world into which he had thought to send pure and lovely Ellen?

After a long time he heard his uncle sigh in his sleep, and the tears began to run down his cheeks. It must be almost morning; he would wrap himself in his coat and await the striking of the hour, then, if it was not too early to disturb his uncle, he would make up the fire. Moreover, he would make it up with these hideous writings for which he had spent good money.

But deliberation brought better counsel—Ellen would have no encounter with war! Besides, it was a Russian story and Ellen did not mean to go to Russia. He would read the other books.

The next evening he did not wait until Grandfather had gone to bed; but laid his book inside the manuscript of "The Mystic Dove" and began. A great deal of "Evelyn Innes" he did not understand, but he understood enough. He read like a child for the story, all else escaping his immature attention. The technique of music was an uncharted sea; the ambitions of Mr. Innes he did not comprehend; he had never seen an opera, nor was he able to picture one. But he saw clearly what had happened to Evelyn. A cold perspiration broke out upon him. It was well for Ellen that he had set out to discover the world!

Then he was guilty of a curious and natural inconsistency. He concluded that it was his duty to acquaint himself further with wickedness, so that he might the better resist it. When he had finished "Evelyn," he returned to the book of Russian stories, laying it, too, between the pages of "The Mystic Dove." He saw a dark river which carried on its strong current a raft, and understood that a young man, a pious Christian, worked at the stern and watched his wife made much of in a shameful way by his own father in the bow.

But still he read on. "The Raft" was short; midnight was still far away; he opened the third book. Again the accident of his choice was unfortunate. The story was simply and plainly told. Bertha Garlan, widowed and with a little child, sought out, under pressure of irresistible desire for affection, an old sweetheart who had attained fame and who lived grossly, and had with him a brief liaison. Her passion and her shame were pictured with equal skill—it was a moving tale, and it pointed as bitter a lesson as the pen of moralist could present.

It was not strange that when he tried to work at his "Mystic Dove," the language proved dull and meaningless. He ceased to translate and began to walk about, traveling over the frozen roads at night like one condemned to wander for his sins. The world was a whirlpool of crime in which each hour betrayed and murdered thousands were sucked down to destruction. His uncle had been right.

At last he began to think of another way to help Ellen. His uncle believed and had taught him that a man's first concern should be the eternal safety of his own soul. Might there not be a higher duty? Speculating, he felt his cheeks burn, his heart throb quickly.