eyebrows. "That's bad."

Grace rose from the chair, flushing up to the roots of his hair,--

"Right!" he reiterated. "Yes, _right_ I say. And how, I ask you, can a
man battle against the faintest element of right and truth, even when it
will and _must_ arraign itself on the side of wrong? If I could shut my
eyes to the right, and see only the wrong, I might leave myself at least
a blind content, but I cannot--i cannot. If I could look upon these
things as Barholm does----" But here he stopped, suddenly checking
himself.

"Thank God you cannot," put in Derrick quietly.

For a few minutes the Reverend Paul paced the room in silence.

"Among the men who were once his fellow-workers, Craddock is an oracle,"
he went on. "His influence is not unlike Joan Lowrie's. It is the
influence of a strong mind over weaker ones. His sharp sarcastic
speeches are proverbs among the Rigganites; he amuses them and can make
them listen to him. When he holds up 'Th' owd parson' to their ridicule,
he sweeps all before him. He can undo in an hour what I have struggled a
year to accomplish. He was a collier himself until he became
superannuated, and he knows their natures, you see."

"What has he to say about Barholm?" asked Derrick--without looking at
his friend, however.

"Oh!" he protested, "that is the worst side of it--that is
miserable--that is wretched! I may as well speak openly. Barholm is his
strong card, and that is what baffles me. He scans Barholm with the eye
of an eagle. He does not spare a single weakness. He studies him--he
knows his favorite phrases and gestures by heart, and has used them
until there is not a Riggan collier who does not recognize them when
they are presented to him, and applaud them as an audience might applaud
the staple jokes of a popular actor."

Explained even thus far, the case looked difficult enough; but Derrick
felt no wonder at his friend's discouragement when he had heard his
story to the end, and understood it fully.

The living at Riggan had never been happily managed. It had been
presented to men who did not understand the people under their charge,
and to men whom the people failed to understand; but possibly it had
never before fallen into the hands of a man who was so little qualified
to govern Rigganites, as was the present rector, the Reverend Harold
Barholm. A man who has mistaken his vocation, and who has become ever so
faintly conscious of his blunder, may be a stumbling-block in