when the boy was fourteen
years old, his mother having died at his birth.

It was tacitly understood by Walter that his uncle was educating him
for the priesthood. His life, from the time the bishop took charge of
him until he was ready for college, was spent in Church
boarding-schools.

A spiritually minded, thoughtful boy, of an emotional temperament which
responded to every appeal of beauty, whether of form, color, sound, or
ethics, Walter easily fell in with his uncle's designs for him, and
rivaled him in the fervor of his devotion to the esthetic ritual of his
Church.

His summer vacations were spent at Bar Harbor with the bishop's family,
which consisted of his wife and two anemic daughters. They were people
of limited interests, who built up barriers about their lives on all
sides; social hedges which excluded all humanity but a select and very
dull, uninteresting circle; intellectual walls which never admitted a
stray unconventional idea; moral demarcations which nourished within
them the Mammon of self-righteousness, and theological harriers which
shut out the sunlight of a broad charity.

Therefore, when in the course of his career at Harvard, Walter
Fairchilds discovered that intellectually he had outgrown not only the
social creed of the divine right of the well-born, in which these
people had educated him, but their theological creed as well, the
necessity of breaking the fact to them, of wounding their affection for
him, of disappointing the fond and cherished hope with which for years
his uncle had spent money upon his education--the ordeal which he had
to face was a fiery one.

When, in deepest sorrow, and with all the delicacy of his sensitive
nature, he told the bishop of his changed mental attitude toward the
problem of religion, it seemed to him that in his uncle's reception of
it the spirit of the Spanish Inquisitors was revived, so mad appeared
to him his horror of this heresy and his conviction that he, Walter,
was a poison in the moral atmosphere, which must be exterminated at any
cost.

In this interview between them, the bishop stood revealed to him in a
new character, and yet Walter seemed to realize that in his deeper
consciousness he had always known him for what he really was, though
all the circumstances of his conventional life had conduced to hide his
real self. He saw, now, how the submissiveness of his own dreamy
boyhood had never called into active force his guardian's native