k at their glistening eyes! Mrs. Callender blows
withering blasts on this head also, saying it is no place for a 'laddie,'
whereupon I lie low and think much but say nothing.

"Our great night is Sunday night after service. Yes, indeed, Sunday!
That's just when the devil's houses are all open round about us, and why
should God's house be shut up? It is all very well for the people who
have only one Sabbath in the week to keep it wholly holy--I have seven,
being a follower of Jesus, not of Moses. But the rector of the parish has
begun to complain of my 'intrusion,' and to tell the Bishop I ought to be
'mended or ended.' It seems that my 'doings' are 'indecent and
unnecessary,' and my sermons are 'a violation of all the sanctities, all
the modesties of existence.' Poor dumb dog, teaching the Gospel of Don't!
The world has never been reformed by 'resignation' to the evils of life,
or converted by 'silence' either.

"How I wish you were here, in the midst of it all! And--who
knows?--perhaps you will be some day yet. Do not trouble to answer
this--I will write again soon, and may then have something practical to
say to you. _Au revoir!_"

XI.

On the day of the drawing-room meeting a large company gathered in the
hall at Belgrave Square. Lady Robert Ure, back from the honeymoon,
received the guests for her mother, whose weak heart and a headache kept
her upstairs. Her husband stood aside, chewing the end of his mustache
and looking through his eyeglass with a gleam of amused interest in his
glittering eye. There were many ladies, all fashionably dressed, and one
of them wore a seagull's wing in her hat, with part of the root left
visible and painted red to show that it had been torn out of the living
bird. The men were nearly all clergymen, and the cut of their cloth and
the fashions of their ties indicated the various complexions of their
creeds. They glanced at each other with looks of embarrassment, and Mrs.
Callender, who came in like a breeze off a Scottish moor, said audibly
that she had never seen "sae many craws on one tree before." The
Archdeacon was there with his head up, talking loudly to Lady Robert. She
stood motionless in her place, never turning her head toward John Storm,
though it was plain that she was looking at him constantly. More than
once he caught an expression of pain in her face, and felt pity for her
as one of the brides who had acted the lie of marrying without love. But
his spirits wer