a heathen priestess, yet she
worships a god of some sort. Do you?" He stopped suddenly; the
humility which men hated in him again blanketed his fanaticism. "It is
my task to give her a better god--the only true God--Christ."

Bunsen, his legs wide apart, kept his eyes on the sea, for he did not
want to let Simpson see him smiling, and he was smiling. Witherbee,
who had no emotions of any sort, pulled his moustache farther down and
looked at the clergyman as though he were under glass--a curiosity.

"So you're going to convert the whole island?" he said.

"I hope to make a beginning in the Lord's vineyard."

"Humph! The devil's game-preserve, you mean," Bunsen suddenly broke
in.

"The devil's game-preserve, then!" Simpson was defiant.

"The ship calls here every other Saturday," was all Bunsen said to
that. "You may need to know. I'll send your trunk ashore."

He stepped into the cripple's boat and started for the ship. Witherbee
did not speak; Simpson, still raging, left him, strode to the end of
the pier, and stood there, leaning on a pile.

His gust of emotion had left him; a not unfamiliar feeling of
exaltation had taken its place. It is often so with the extreme
Puritan type; control relaxed for however brief a moment sends their
slow blood whirling, and leaves them light-headed as those who breathe
thin air. From boyhood Simpson had been practised in control, until
repression had become a prime tenet of his faith. The cheerful and
generally innocent excursions of other men assumed in his mind the
proportions of crime, of sin against the stern disciplining of the
soul which he conceived to be the goal of life. Probably he had never
in all his days been so shocked as once when a young pagan had scorned
certain views of his, saying; "There's more education--soul education,
if you will have it--in five minutes of sheer joy than in a century of
sorrow." It was an appalling statement, that--more appalling because
he had tried to contradict it and had been unable to do so. He himself
had been too eager to find his work in life--his pre-ordained
work--ever to discover the deep truths that light-heartedness only can
reveal; even when he heard his call to foreign missions--to Hayti, in
particular--he felt no such felicity as a man should feel who has
climbed to his place in the scheme of things. His was rather the
sombre fury of the Covenanters--an intense conviction that his way was
the only way of grace--a convict