d to
the other room. There was a fire burning now, and a book lay under the
lamp on a little table, with a silver paper-cutter through the middle to
mark the page.

"How you remind me of your mother sometimes, John! That was just like her
voice, do you know--just!"

Two hours afterward he led John Storm down the long corridor to the hall.
His bleak face looked soft and his deep voice had a slight tremor.
"Good-night, my dear boy, and remember your money is always waiting for
you. Until your Christian social state is established you are only an
advocate of socialism, and may fairly use your own. If yours is the
Christianity of the first century it has to exist in the nineteenth, you
know. You can't live on air or fly without wings. I shall be curious to
see what approach, to the Christian ideal the condition of civilization
admits of. Yet I don't know what your religious friends and the humdrum
herd will think of you--mad probably, or at least weak and childish and
perhaps even a hunter after easy popularity. But good-night, and God
bless you in, your people's church and Devil's Acre!"

John was flushed and excited. He had been talking of his plans, his
hopes, his expectations. God would provide for him in this as in
everything, and then God's priest ought to be God's poor. Meantime two
gentlemen in plush waited for him at the door. One handed him his hat,
the other his stick and gloves.

Then with regular steps, and his hands behind him, the Prime Minister
paced back through the quiet corridors. Returning to the library, he took
up his book and tried to read. It was a novel, but he could not attend to
the incidents in other people's lives. From time to time he said to
himself: "Poor boy! Will he find her? Will he save her?" One pathetic
idea had fixed itself on his mind--John Storm's love of God was love of a
woman, and she was fallen and wrecked and lost.

A fortnight later John wrote to Glory:

"Fairly under weigh at last, dear Glory! Taken priest's orders, got the
Bishop's 'license to officiate,' and found myself a church. It is St.
Mary Magdalene's, Crown Street, Soho, a district that has borne for three
hundred years the name of the 'Devil's Acre,' bears it still, and
deserves it. The church is an old proprietary place, licensed, not
consecrated, formerly belonging to Greek, or Italian, or French, or some
other refugees, but long shut up and now much out of repair. Present
owners, a company of Greek merchant