clinched this resolve because there was something so genuine and sweet
and earnest about it. He could not help thinking that the man might know
more of God than he was able to make plain to his hearers. He had really
never noticed either a prayer or a sermon before in his life. He had sat
in the room with very few. He wondered if all sermons and prayers were
like these and wished he had noticed them. He had never been much of a
church goer.

But the climax, the real heart of his whole two days, was after Sunday
dinner when he went out to call upon Ruth Macdonald. And it was
characteristic of his whole reticent nature, and the way he had been
brought up, that he did not tell his mother where he was going. It had
never occurred to him to tell her his movements when they did not
directly concern her, and she had never brought herself up to ask him. It
is the habit of some women, and many mothers.

A great embarrassment fell upon him as he entered the grounds of the
Macdonald place, and when he stood before the plate-glass doors waiting
for an answer to his ring he would have turned and fled if he had not
promised to come.

It was perhaps not an accident that Ruth let him in herself and took him
to a big quiet library with wide-open windows overlooking the lawn, and
heavy curtains shutting them in from the rest of the house, where, to his
great amazement, he could feel at once at ease with her and talk to her
just as he had done in her letters and his own.

Somehow it was like having a lifetime dream suddenly fulfilled to be
sitting this way in pleasant converse with her, watching the lights and
shadows of expression flit across her sensitive face, and knowing that
the light in her eyes was for him. It seemed incredible, but she
evidently enjoyed talking to him. Afterwards he thought about it as if
their souls had been calling to one another across infinite space, things
that neither of them could quite hear, and now they were within hailing
distance.

He had thanked her for the sweater and other things, and they had talked
a little about the old school days and how life changed people, when he
happened to glance out of the window near him and saw a man in officer's
uniform approaching. He stopped short in the midst of a sentence and
rose, his face set, his eyes still on the rapidly approaching soldiers:

"I'm sorry," he said, "I shall have to go. It's been wonderful to come,
but I must go at once. Perhaps you'll le