lippa, in his first dim moments of
returning consciousness, stammering out those distracted words:
"Perhaps God will forgive me." To John Fenn those words meant the
crowning of all his efforts: she had repented!

"Truly," he said, lying very white and feeble on his pillow and looking
into Philly's face when she brought him his gruel, "truly,

"He moves in a mysterious way
His wonders to perform!"

The "mysterious way" was the befalling of that terrible illness in
Henry Roberts's house, so that Philippa should be impressed by it. "If
my affliction has been blessed to any one else, I am glad to have
suffered it," he said.

Philippa silently put a spoonful of gruel between his lips; he
swallowed it as quickly as he could. "I heard you call upon God for
forgiveness; the Lord is merciful and gracious!"

Philly said, very low, "Yes; oh YES." So John Fenn thanked God and took
his gruel, and thought it was very good. He thought, also, that Miss
Philippa was very good to be so good to him. In those next few days,
before he was strong enough to be moved back to his own house, he
thought more of her goodness and less of her salvation. It was then
that he had his great moment, his revealing moment! All of a sudden,
at the touch of Life, his honest artificiality had dropped from him,
and he knew that he had never before known anything worth knowing! He
knew he was in love. He knew it when he realized that he was not in
the least troubled about her soul. "That is what she meant!" he
thought; "she wanted me to care for her, before I cared for her soul."
He was so simple in his acceptance of the revelation that she loved
him, that when he went to ask her to be his wife the blow of her reply
almost knocked him back into his ministerial affectations:

"No."

When John Fenn got home that evening he went into his study and shut
the door. Mary came and pounded on it, but he only said, in a muffled
voice:

"No, Mary. Not now. Go away."

He was praying for resignation to what he told himself was the will of
God. "The Lord is unwilling that my thoughts should be diverted from
His service by my own personal happiness." Then he tried to put his
thoughts on that service by deciding upon a text for his next sermon.
But the texts which suggested themselves were not steadying to his
bewildered mind:

"LOVE ONE ANOTHER." ("I certainly thought she loved me.")

"MARVEL NOT, MY BRETHREN, IF THE WORLD HATE YOU." ("I am, perhaps