I believe. I--Hello!... Missed him,
by Jove!"

"What was it? A cat?"

"Didn't you see? Our old hoodoo--that camp-meeting chap!..."

"Oh!"

"I wonder what ill wind he's blowing this time.... Poetic justice if I'd
knocked him into the middle of next week."

Carlisle had involuntarily looked back, struck with a sense of
coincidence, and also with the odd feeling of having received a douche
of cold water. They were, it seemed, rolling along through old South
Street, and behind her, sure enough, she saw the looming shape of the
ancient hotel, which the Settlement Association could have for
twenty-five thousand dollars cash. Of the "camp-meeting chap," however,
she saw nothing: presumably, having evaded justice, he had already
disappeared into his lair. Nevertheless she was effectually reminded
that this man was still in the world.

"Is this where the fellow lives?" said Canning, also glancing back down
the dingy street. "I thought somebody said he'd come into money from his
lamented uncle."

She confirmed the conjecture, and Hugo then observed:

"Well, I'll give him a month to discover that it's his duty to God to
remove to a more fashionable neighborhood."

"Oh! Do you think so?"

"Have you ever known one of these smooth religious fellows who wasn't
keen after the fleshpots when his chance came?"

Carlisle laughed and said she hadn't, having indeed known few religious
fellows of any kind in her young life. But she was struck with this new
proof of Hugo's essential congeniality with her. His penetrating
comment, born, it seemed, of that curious antipathy which she had
noticed before, fell in astonishingly with trends of her own.

Many weeks had passed since Carlisle had decided to oust this religious
fellow definitely from her thoughts, as belonging so clearly to that
past upon which she had now turned a victorious back. And in these
expulsive processes, she had found herself greatly assisted by the young
man's confession of hypocrisy, as she regarded it, on this very subject
of giving away money. Perhaps this had seemed a frail club once; she
herself had hardly put much strength in it in the beginning; but she had
been resolute, and time had strengthened her convincingly, according to
her need. For if the man was a whited sepulchre, full of dead men's
bones within, then clearly his opinions of people and their families
were not of the slightest importance to anybody, so what was the good of
anybody's thinkin