rise. As he said good-bye to Helen, she became
aware that his usual hesitating, nervous awkwardness had given place to
quiet, thoughtful dignity. A great resolve and a great sacrifice had
lifted him far above things small and common.

V

"YEA, AND HIS OWN LIFE ALSO"

When Helen entered her own room she had leisure to analyse the tumult
of emotion filling her heart. Amazement, shame, anger, dismay, grief,
were surging across her soul.

"How can he think of leaving his mother? It is a shame!" she cried
indignantly to herself. But why this hot sense of shame? "Nonsense!"
she protested vehemently to herself, "it is that poor, dear old lady I
am thinking of." She remembered that sudden stab at her heart at the
old lady's broken words, "He will be going away, lassie," and her cheek
flamed hot again. "It is all nonsense," she repeated angrily, and there
being no one to contradict her, she said it again with even greater
emphasis. But suddenly she sat down, and before long she found herself
smiling at the memory of the old lady's proud cry, "Could not? Ay, he
could." And now she knew why her heart was so full of happy pride. It
was for Shock. He was a man strong enough to see his duty and brave
enough to face what to him was the bitterness of death, for well she
knew what his mother was to him.

"He will go," she whispered to her looking-glass, "and I'd go with him
to-morrow. But"--and her race flamed hot--"he must never know."

But he did come to know, to his own great amazement and overwhelming,
humbling gladness.

Shock's determination to offer himself to the far West awakened in his
friends various emotions.

"It is just another instance of how religious fanaticism will lead men
to the most fantastic and selfish acts," was Mrs. Fairbanks' verdict,
which effected in Brown a swift conversion. Hitherto he had striven
with might and main to turn Shock from his purpose, using any and every
argument, fair or unfair, to persuade him that his work lay where it
had been begun, in the city wards. He was the more urged to this course
that he had shrewdly guessed Helen's secret, so sacredly guarded. But
on hearing Mrs. Fairbanks' exclamation, he at once plunged into a warm
defence of his friend's course.

"The finest thing I ever heard of," he declared. "No one knows what
these two are to each other, and yet there they are, both of them,
arriving at the opinion that Shock's work lies in the West."

"But to leave hi