men--a
pity so intense and tender that it verged on respect and veneration.
He passed his nieces' house on the way to the minister's, and both were
looking out of windows and saw his lips moving.

"There he goes, talking to himself like a crazy loon," said Amanda.

Alma nodded.

Jim went on, blissfully unconscious. He talked in a quiet monotone; only
now and then his voice rose; only now and then there were accompanying
gestures. Jim had a straight mile down the broad village street to walk
before he reached the church and the parsonage beside it.

Jim and the minister had been friends since boyhood. They were graduates
and classmates of the same college. Jim had had unusual educational
advantages for a man coming from a simple family. The front door of the
parsonage flew open when Jim entered the gate, and the minister stood
there smiling. He was a tall, thin man with a wide mouth, which either
smiled charmingly or was set with severity. He was as brown and dry as a
wayside weed which winter had subdued as to bloom but could not entirely
prostrate with all its icy storms and compelling blasts. Jim, advancing
eagerly toward the warm welcome in the door, was a small man, and bent
at that, but he had a handsome old face, with the rose of youth on the
cheeks and the light of youth in the blue eyes, and the quick changes of
youth, before emotions, about the mouth.

"Hullo, Jim!" cried Dr. Edward Hayward. Hayward, for a doctor of
divinity, was considered somewhat lacking in dignity at times; still,
he was Dr. Hayward, and the failing was condoned. Moreover, he was
a Hayward, and the Haywards had been, from the memory of the oldest
inhabitant, the great people of the village. Dr. Hayward's house was
presided over by his widowed cousin, a lady of enough dignity to make up
for any lack of it in the minister. There were three servants, besides
the old butler who had been Hayward's attendant when he had been a young
man in college. Village people were proud of their minister, with his
degree and what they considered an imposing household retinue.

Hayward led, and Jim followed, to the least pretentious room in
the house--not the study proper, which was lofty, book-lined, and
leather-furnished, curtained with broad sweeps of crimson damask, but a
little shabby place back of it, accessible by a narrow door. The little
room was lined with shelves; they held few books, but a collection of
queer and dusty things--strange weapons