A MINISTER

Having thus received a sad jolt through the medium of his affections,
Mr. Thompson, like countless numbers of human beings before him, set
about gathering himself together. He did a tremendous lot of thinking
about things in general, about himself and Sophie Carr in particular.
Moping in that isolated cabin his mind took on a sort of abnormal
activity. He could not even stop thinking when he wanted to stop. He
would lie awake in the silent darkness long after he should have been
asleep, going over his narrow and uneventful existence, the unwelcome
and anguished present, the future that was nothing but a series of blank
pages which he had yet to turn in God only knew what bitterness and
sorrow. That was the way he gloomily put it to himself. He had still to
learn what an adaptable, resilient organism man is. This, his first
tentative brush with life, with the realities of pain and passion, had
left him exceedingly cast down, more than a little inclined to
pessimism.

He experienced gusts of unreasoning anger at Sophie Carr, forgetting, as
a man wounded in his egotism and disappointed in his first passionate
yearning for a mate is likely to forget, that he had brought it on
himself, that Sophie had not encouraged him, nor lured him to his
undoing, nor given him aught to nourish the illusion that she was his
for the asking.

Sometimes he would have a vivid flash of jealousy when he thought about
her and Tommy Ashe, when he recalled her admissions. And he would soften
from that mood, twisting his lips wryly, when he remembered the pitying
tenderness of her good-by.

He could not in the least understand the girl nor her motives, any more
than he could understand the transformation that he felt vaguely was
taking place in himself. She was too wise for her years and her
experience. There was a stinging truth in some of the things she said.
And it was his fault, not hers, that they were unpalatable truths. What
did a man like himself have to offer a girl like her? Nothing. She had
his measure in everything but sheer brute strength, most of all in the
stoutness of her resolution. For Mr. Thompson, pondering soberly,
realized that if he gave free play to the feelings Sophie Carr had
stirred up in him, there was no folly he was not capable of committing.
He, whose official creed it was to expound self-denial, would have
followed his impulses blindly. He would have married out of hand.

And after that, what?