ook at
that dull sky and to hear the wind that was fast stripping the last sere
leaves from willow and maple and birch, and to feel that indefinable
touch of harshness, the first frigid fingerings of the frost-gods in the
air, gave him a swift touch of depression. He shivered a little. Turning
to his wood box he hastened to build a fire in the stove.

He stoked that rusty firebox until by the time he had cooked and eaten
breakfast it was glowing red. When he sat with his feet cocked up on the
stove front and gave himself up to the sober business of thought, it
seemed to him that he was passing a portentous milestone. To his
unsophisticated mind the simple fact that Sophie Carr had permitted him
to kiss her, that for a moment her head with its fluffy aureole of
yellow hair had rested willingly upon his shoulder, created a bond
between them, an understanding, a tentative promise, a cleaving together
that could have but one conclusion. He found himself reflecting upon
that--to him--most natural conclusion with a peculiar mixture of
gladness and doubt. For even in his exaltation he could not visualize
Sophie Carr as an ideal minister's helpmate. He simply could not. He
could hear too plainly the scorn of her tone as she spoke of
"parasitical parsons", of "unthinking acceptance of priestly myths", of
the Church, his Church, as "an organization essentially materialistic in
its aims and activities", and many more such phrases which were new and
startling to Thompson, even if they had been current among radical
thinkers long enough to become incorporated in a great deal that has
been written upon philosophy and theology.

Sophie didn't believe in his God, nor his work; he stopped short of
asking if he himself any longer had full and implicit belief in these
things, or if he had simply accepted them without question as he had
accepted so many other things in his brief career. But she believed in
_him_ and cared for him. He took that for granted too. And love covers
a multitude of sins. He had often had occasion to discourse upon various
sorts of love--fatherly love and brotherly love and maternal affection
and so on. But this flare of passionate tenderness focussing upon one
slender bit of a girl was something he could not quite fathom. He would
have contradicted with swift anger any suggestion that perhaps it was
merely wise old Nature's ancient method efficiently at work for an
appointed end. He had been so thoroughly grounde