aking was a good work,
perhaps the highest and noblest kind of work there is to be done in the
world. From this conviction also came a glow of happiness. Yet there
kept recurring chill shudderings of self-reproach. Something within him
kept whispering that he had bartered his soul for happiness.

'I have chosen the easier and therefore the baser way,' he said. 'I have
shrunk from toil and pain. I have refused to make the sacrifice demanded
of me.'

He went back again to the story of his father's vision. For a moment
it seemed quite clear that he had deliberately refused the call to the
great fight, that he had judged himself unworthy, being cowardly and
selfish in his heart. Then he remembered that the Captain of whom his
father had told him was no one else but Christ, the same Christ of whom
Canon Beecher spoke, the Good Shepherd whose love he had discovered to
be the greatest need of all.

'I must have Him,' he said--'I must have Him--and Marion.'

Again with the renewed decision came a glow of happiness and a sense of
rest, until there rose, as if to smite him, the thought of Ireland--of
Ireland, poor, derided of strangers, deserted by her sons, roped in as
a prize-ring where selfish men struggle ignobly for sordid gains The
children of the land fled from it sick with despair. Its deserted houses
were full of all doleful things. Cormorants and the daughters of the owl
lodged in the lintels of them.

Sullen desolation was on the threshold, while satyrs cried to their
fellows across tracts of brown rush-grown land. Aliens came to hiss and
passed by wagging their hands. Over all was the monotony of the gray
sky, descending and still descending with clouds that came upon the
land, mistily folding it in close embraces of death. Voices sounded far
off and unreal through the gloom. The final convulsive struggles of the
nation's life grew feebler and fewer. Of all causes Ireland's seemed the
most hopelessly lost. Was he, too, going to forsake her? He felt that in
spite of all the good promised him there would always hang over his life
a gloom that oven Marion's love would not disperse, the heavy shadow of
Ireland's Calvary. For Marion there would be no such darkness, nor would
Marion understand it. But surely Christ understood. Words of His crowded
to the memory. 'When He beheld the city He wept over it, saying,
Oh, Jerusalem, Jerusalem!' Most certainly He understood this, as He
understood all human emotion. He, too, ha