ition you meet with everywhere is the
opposition of evil to good, of indifference to piety. When will you
learn that it is the good in your hearers which opposes you, the love of
God in them which is offended by your representation of Him?"

* * * * *

Hugh's eyes were fixed on the same pillar as Mr. Tristram's, but if he
had been aware of that fact he would have chosen another pillar. His
thin, handsome face was beginning to show the marks of mental strain.
His eyes had the set, impassive look of one who, hedged in on both
sides, sees a sharp turn ahead of him on an unknown road.

* * * * *

"Rachel! Rachel! Rachel! Don't you hear me calling to you? Don't you
hear me telling you that I can't live without you? The hymn was
right--'Other refuge have I none, Hangs my helpless soul on Thee'--only
it was written of you, not of that far, far away God who does not care.
Only care for me. Only love me. Only give me those cool hands that I may
lean my forehead against them. No help can come to me except through
you. Stoop down to me and raise me up, for I love you."

The sun went in suddenly, and a cold shadow fell on the pillar and on
Hugh's heart.

Love and marriage were not for him. That far-away God, that Judge in the
black cap, had pronounced sentence against him, had doomed that he
should die in his sins. When he had sat in his own village church only
last Sunday between his mother and sister, he had seen the empty place
on his chancel wall where the tablet to his memory would be put up. When
he walked through the church-yard, his mother leaning on his arm, his
step regulated by her feeble one, he had seen the vacant space by his
father's grave already filled by the mound of raw earth which would
shortly cover him. His heart had ached for his mother, for the gentle,
feeble-minded sister, who had transferred the interest in life, which
keeps body and soul together, from her colorless existence to that of
her brother. Hughie was the romance of her gray life: what Hughie said,
what Hughie thought, Hughie's wife--oh, jealous thought, only to be met
by prayer! But later on--joy of joys--Hughie's children! He realized it,
now and then, vaguely, momentarily, but never as fully as last Sunday.
He shrank from the remembrance, and his mind wandered anew in the
labyrinth of broken, twisted thought, from which he could find no way
out.

_There must be some way out!