up to me--I'll leave." With a swing he had put out the
lights in the big, bare living-room and gone into the bedroom beyond.
He tried to sleep, but the tortured nerves, the nerves of a high-bred
race-horse, eager, ever ready for action, would not be quiet. The
great, rich city, the great poverty-stricken masses seething through
it, the rushing, grinding work of the huge parish, had eaten into his
youth and strength enormously already in six months. He had given
himself right and left, suffered with the suffering, as no human being
can and keep balance, till now he was, unknowingly, at the edge of a
breakdown. And the distrust of his own fitness, the forgetfulness
that, under one's own limitations, is an unlimited reserve which is the
only hope of any of us in any real work; this was the form of the
retort of his overwrought nerves. Yet at last he slept.

Meantime as he slept the hours crept away and it was morning and an
early postman came and opened the box with a rattling key and took out
three letters which the deaconess had sent to her scattered family, and
one, oddly written, which the janitor had executed for his mother in
Italy, and the letter to the girl. From hand to hand it sped, and
away, and was hidden in a sack in a long mail-train, and at last,
Robert Halarkenden, on the 25th of September, came down the garden
path, and the girl, reading in the wild garden, laid aside her book and
watched him as he came, and thought how familiar and pleasant a sight
was the gaunt, tall figure, pausing on the gravelled walk to touch a
blossom, to lift a fallen branch, as lovingly as a father would care
for his children. "A letter, lassie," Robert Halarkenden said, and
held out the thick envelope; and then did an extraordinary thing for
Robert Halarkenden. He looked at the address in the unmistakable, big,
black writing and looked at the girl and stood a moment, with a
question in his eyes. The girl flushed. "Checkmate in six moves" was
quite enough to say to this girl; one did not have to play the game
brutally to a finish.

She laughed then. "I knew you must have wondered," she said, and with
that she told the story of the letters.

"It's no wrong," Robert Halarkenden considered.

The girl jumped to her answer. "Wrong!" she cried, "I should say not.
It's salvation--hope--life. Maybe all that; at the least it's the
powers of good, fighting for me. Something of the sort--I don't know,"
she finished lamely.