e meaning that he had thrown into his words. "And we both mean it
now, I'm sure. But there's a difference, Jeffrey, a difference with
you."

"I don't know it," he said a little shortly. "I'm still doing just the
thing I started out to do that day."

"Yes. But that day you started out to fight for the people. Now you
are fighting for yourself-- Oh, not for anything selfish! Not for
anything you want for yourself! I know that. But you have made the
fight your own. It is your own quarrel now. You are fighting because
you have come to hate the railroad people."

"Well, you wouldn't expect me to love them?"

"No. I'm not blaming you, Jeff. But--but, I'm afraid. Hate is a
terrible thing. I wish you were out of it all. Hate can only hurt you.
I'm afraid of a scar that it might leave on you through all the long,
long years of life. Can you see? I'm afraid of something that might go
deeper than all this, something that might go as deep as life. After
all, that's what I'm afraid of, I guess--Life, great, big, terrible,
menacing, Life!"

"My life?" Jeffrey asked gruffly.

"I have faced that," the girl answered evenly, "just as you have faced
it. And I am not afraid of that. No. It's what you might do in
anger--if they hurt you again. Something that would scar your heart
and your soul. Jeffrey, do you know that sometimes I've seen the
worst, the worst--even _murder_ in your eyes!"

"I wish," the boy returned shortly, "the Bishop would keep his
religion out of all this. He's a good man and a good friend," he went
on, "but I don't like this religion coming into everything."

"But how can he? He cannot keep religion apart from life and right and
wrong. What good would religion be if it did not go ahead of us in
life and show us the way?"

"But what's the use?" the boy said grudgingly. "What good does it do?
You wouldn't have thought of any of this only for that last part of
his letter. Why does that have to come into everything? It's the
Catholic Church all over again, always pushing in everywhere."

"Isn't that funny," the girl said, brightening; "I have cried myself
sick thinking just that same thing. I have gone almost frantic
thinking that if I once gave in to the Church it would crush me and
make me do everything that I didn't want to do. And now I never think
of it. Life goes along really just as though being a Catholic didn't
make any difference at all."

"That's because you've given in to it altogether. You don't