wounds of a friend."

"Are you my friend?" Philly asked, lifting her gray eyes suddenly.

Mr. Fenn was greatly confused; the text-books of the Western Seminary
had not supplied him with the answer to such a question. He explained,
hurriedly, that he was the friend of all who wished for salvation.

"I do not especially wish for it," Philippa said, very low.

For a moment John Fenn was silent with horror. "That one so young
should be so hardened!" he thought; aloud, he bade her remember hell
fire. He spoke with that sad and simple acceptance of the fact with
which, even less than fifty years ago, men humbled themselves before
the mystery which they had themselves created, of divine injustice.
She must know, he said, his voice trembling with sincerity, that those
who slighted the offers of grace were cast into outer darkness?

Philly said, softly, "Maybe."

"'Maybe?' Alas, it is, certainly! Oh, why, WHY do you absent yourself
from the house of God?" he said, holding out entreating hands.
Philippa made no reply. "Let us pray!" said the young man; and they
knelt down side by side in the shadowy parlor. John Fenn lifted his
harsh, melancholy face, gazing upward passionately, while he wrestled
for her salvation; Philly, looking downward, tracing with a trembling
finger the pattern of the beadwork on the ottoman before which she
knelt, listened with an inward shiver of dismay and ecstasy. But when
they rose to their feet she had nothing to say. He, too, was silent.
He went away quite exhausted by his struggle with this impassive,
unresisting creature.

He hardly spoke to Mary all the way home. "A hardened sinner," he was
thinking. "Poor, lovely creature! So young and so lost!" Under Mary's
incessant chatter, her tugs at the end of the reins, her little bursts
of joy at the sight of a bird or a roadside flower, he was thinking,
with a strange new pain--a pain no other sinner had ever roused in
him--of the girl he had left. He knew that his arguments had not moved
her. "I believe," he thought, the color rising in his face, "that she
dislikes me! She says she loves Dr. Lavendar; yes, she must dislike
me. Is my manner too severe? Perhaps my appearance is unattractive."
He looked down at his coat uneasily.

As for Philly, left to herself, she picked up a bit of sewing, and her
face, at first pale, grew slowly pink. "He only likes sinners," she
thought; "and, oh, I am not a sinner!"

CHAPTER II

After that