ng--that he had
expected and hoped for his progress through missionary work and small
churches eventually to bestow upon him a call to a wider field--a call
which Sam Carr had callously suggested meant neither more nor less than
a bigger church, a wider social circle, a bigger salary. And Thompson
could see that he had been looking forward to these things as a just
reward, and he could see too how the material benefits in them were the
lure. He had been coached and primed for that. His inclination had been
sedulously directed into that channel. His enthusiasm had been the
enthusiasm of one who seeks to serve and feels wholly competent.

But he doubted both his fitness and his inclination now. He said to
himself that when a man loses heart in his work he should abandon that
work. He tried to muster up a resentful feeling against Sophie Carr for
the emotional havoc she had wrought, and the best he could do was a
despairing pang of loneliness. He wanted her. Above all he wanted her.
And she was a rank infidel--a crass materialist--an intellectual Circe.
Why, in the name of God, he asked himself passionately, must _he_ lose
his heart so fully to a woman with whom he could have nothing more in
common save the common factor that she was a woman and he a man.

Mr. Thompson had not as yet discovered what a highly important factor
that last was.

He managed to get a partial insight into that some three days later, and
the vision was vouchsafed him in a simple and natural manner, although
to him at the time it seemed the most wonderful and unaccountable thing
in the world.

CHAPTER IX

UNIVERSAL ATTRIBUTES

Afterward Thompson could never quite determine what prompted him to
follow Sophie Carr when he saw her go down toward the creek bank. He was
on his way to Carr's house, driven thither by pure pressure of
loneliness, born of three days' solitary communion within the limits of
his own shack. He wanted to hear a human voice again. And it was a
vagrant, unaccountable impulse that sent him after Sophie instead of
directing him straight to Carr's living room, where her father would
probably be sitting, pipe in mouth, book in hand.

He hurried with long strides after Sophie. She dipped below the sloping
bank before he came up, and when he came noiselessly down to the grassy
bank she stood leaning against a tree, gazing at the sluggish flow of
Lone Moose.

He had seen her in moods that varied from feminine pettishnes