a confusion arose. Kate Swift
turned and walked to the door. She was a teacher but
she was also a woman. As she looked at George Willard,
the passionate desire to be loved by a man, that had a
thousand times before swept like a storm over her body,
took possession of her. In the lamplight George Willard
looked no longer a boy, but a man ready to play the
part of a man.

The school teacher let George Willard take her into his
arms. In the warm little office the air became suddenly
heavy and the strength went out of her body. Leaning
against a low counter by the door she waited. When he
came and put a hand on her shoulder she turned and let
her body fall heavily against him. For George Willard
the confusion was immediately increased. For a moment
he held the body of the woman tightly against his body
and then it stiffened. Two sharp little fists began to
beat on his face. When the school teacher had run away
and left him alone, he walked up and down the office
swearing furiously.

It was into this confusion that the Reverend Curtis
Hartman protruded himself. When he came in George
Willard thought the town had gone mad. Shaking a
bleeding fist in the air, the minister proclaimed the
woman George had only a moment before held in his arms
an instrument of God bearing a message of truth.

* * *

George blew out the lamp by the window and locking the
door of the printshop went home. Through the hotel
office, past Hop Higgins lost in his dream of the
raising of ferrets, he went and up into his own room.
The fire in the stove had gone out and he undressed in
the cold. When he got into bed the sheets were like
blankets of dry snow.

George Willard rolled about in the bed on which had
lain in the afternoon hugging the pillow and thinking
thoughts of Kate Swift. The words of the minister, who
he thought had gone suddenly insane, rang in his ears.
His eyes stared about the room. The resentment, natural
to the baffled male, passed and he tried to understand
what had happened. He could not make it out. Over and
over he turned the matter in his mind. Hours passed and
he began to think it must be time for another day to
come. At four o'clock he pulled the covers up about his
neck and tried to sleep. When he became drowsy and
closed his eyes, he raised a hand and with it groped
about in the darkness. "I have missed something. I have
missed something Kate Swift was trying to tell me," he
muttered sl