ing her. He
wondered what she would think of him. He feared that she might doubt his
sincerity. But he also had a powerful curiosity as to what she would
say, and her verdict was of more importance to him than that of all the
vestries in the land. He decided to go.

She greeted him with greater enthusiasm than she had ever before
manifested toward him.

"It was wonderful, Arnold, wonderful. I never guessed it was in you. I
can't tell you how proud I was of you. It was a splendid sermon--it was
splendid courage. It was--if only I had the words...."

"You don't need words," he said softly, taking her hands into his, and
looking tenderly into her eyes.

She continued to pour oil on his troubled soul, but she withdrew her
hands, and not again did she allow herself to come so close to him. He
felt vaguely disappointed, even in the midst of her praise.

"I am so humiliated for what I said to you last week," she cried.

"It was what made--this," he said simply.

Suddenly her gaze went beyond him, and he followed it to the doorway.
His face clouded. A gust of annoyance swept him for Judith, for this
trick she had played him. It was unfair of her thus to force him to meet
a man she knew he detested. But his irritation changed to surprise, when
Good, with his long awkward stride, hurried toward him, and seized his
hand.

"Mr. Imrie," he said genuinely, "I was in your church this morning. I
want to tell you that that was one of the biggest things I ever saw. My
congratulations probably don't mean much to you, but they're yours
without a shadow of a reservation. That was the noblest sermon I ever
heard."

The man's enthusiasm was so deep and so obviously sincere that Imrie's
instinctive antipathy was banished. After all, he told himself on
reflection, his dislike for Good was based on his antagonism for the
smug hypocrisy, the senseless irreligion that he had himself attacked
only that morning. In a way they were brothers in a common cause. It was
with a very different feeling than he had expected that he accepted the
tall man's congratulations and with the utmost sincerity that he thanked
him.

Supper proved a gay function. Judith was at her happiest, and Good's
anecdotes followed one another in merry succession. Imrie found himself
insensibly warming to the man he had disliked so intensely, and rather
grateful than otherwise to Judith for having arranged so pleasant a
meeting.

But when the meal was finished and th