she was a Dabney cousin once removed. Thereupon, what little
dexterity was left in him fled away, and the table-trial, under the
smiling eyes of a Miss Euphrasia, became a chapter of horrors.

From absently picking and choosing among the forks, and trying to drink
his bouillon out of the cup in which it was served, to upsetting his
glass of iced tea, he stumbled on in a dream of awkwardness; and when,
to cover the tea mishap, Ardea, emulating the lady hostess who broke one
of her priceless tea-cups at a similar crisis, promptly overturned her
own glass, he was unreasonable enough to be angry.

Taking it all in all, anger was coming to be the one constant quantity
in the procession of varying emotions. By what right did this hollow,
insincere, mocking world, of whose very existence he had been in utter
ignorance, make him a butt for its well-bred sneers? Its fashions and
fripperies and meaningless forms were not beyond learning; and, by
Heaven! he would learn them, too, and put them all to shame. They should
see!

And Ardea: was she laughing at him, too, in the depths of her big,
beautiful eyes? No, that was too much; he would never believe that. But
she was insincere, like the rest of them. It was acting a lie for her to
make-believe clumsiness just to keep the others from laughing at him.
She must stand with her kind.

From that station to the top of the high, bare crag of righteous
condemnation was but a short stage in the wrathful journey; and while he
was choking over the meal of strange dishes the zealous under-thought
was reaching out into the future.

Some day, when his tongue should be loosed, he would stand before this
mocking, smiling, heathenish world with the open Bible in his hand; then
it should be taught what it needed to know--that while it was saying it
was rich, and increased with goods, and had need of nothing, it was
wretched and miserable and poor and blind and naked.

So it came about that it was the convert of Little Zoar, and not the
self-pitying youth searching for his lost boyhood, who escaped finally
from the entanglements of Major Dabney's hospitality.

On the way down the cliff path the fire burned and the revival zeal was
kindled anew. There had been times, in the last year, especially, when
he had thought coldly of the disciple's calling and was minded to break
away and be a skilled craftsman, like his father. Now he was aghast to
think that he had ever been so near the brink of ap