him--his happiness?"

"Rosa, my poor dear Rosa, forgive me! forgive me!"

An hour later, dinner being over, they had returned to the drawing-room.
Rosa was writing at the table, and there was no sound in the room except
the scratching of her pen, the falling of the slips of "copy," and the
dull reverberation of the bell of St. Clement's Danes, which was ringing
for evening service. Glory was sitting at the desk by the window, with
her head on her hands, looking down into the garden. Out of the dead load
at her heart she kept saying to herself: "Could I do that? Could I give
up the one I loved for his own good, putting myself back, and thinking of
him only?" And then a subtle hypocrisy stole over her and she thought,
"Yes I could, I could!" and in a fever of nervous excitement she began to
write a letter:

"The wind bloweth where it listeth, and so with a woman's will. I can not
go abroad with you, dear, because I can not allow myself to break up your
life, for it _would_ be that--it would, it would, you know it would!
There are ten thousand men good enough for the foreign mission field, but
there is only one man in the world for your work in London. This is one
of the things hidden from the wise, and revealed to children and fools.
It would be wrong of me to take you away from your great scene. I daren't
do it. It would be too great a responsibility. My conscience must have
been dead and buried when I suggested such a possibility! Thank God, it
has had a resurrection, and it is not yet too late."

But when the letter was sealed and stamped, and sent out to the post, she
thought: "I must be mad, and there is no method in my madness either.
What do I want--to join his life in London?" And then remembering what
she had written, it seemed as if the other woman must have written
it--the visionary woman, the woman she was making herself into day by
day.

XVII.

John Storm had left home early on Monday morning. It was the last day of
his tenancy of the clergy-house, and there was much to do at Soho. Toward
noon he made his way to the church in Bishopsgate Street for the first
time since he had left the Brotherhood. It was midday service, and the
little place was full of business men with their quick, eyes and eager
faces. The Superior preached, and the sermon was on the religious life.
We were each composed of two beings, one temporal, the other eternal, one
carnal, the other spiritual. Life was a constant warfare