"yes, I suppose what you say is
true."

But he evidently did not suppose so. He sidled to the door, cap in hand.
The clergyman said no more. He was one of those sensitive men who often
know instinctively whether or not their words find response in the heart
of the hearer, and to whom it is always a pain to say anything, even the
most trivial, which awakes no feeling common to both.

Trenholme himself showed the visitors out of his house with a genial,
kindly manner, and when the departing footsteps had ceased to crunch the
garden path he still stood on his verandah, looking after the retreating
figures and feeling somewhat depressed--not as we might suppose St. Paul
would have felt depressed, had he, in like manner, taken the Name for
which he lived upon his lips in vain--and to render that name futile by
reason of our spiritual insignificance is surely the worst form of
profanity--but he felt depressed in the way that a gentleman might who,
having various interests at heart, had failed in a slight attempt to
promote one of them.

It was the evening of one of the balmy days of a late Indian summer. The
stars of the Canadian sky had faded and become invisible in the light of
a moon that hung low and glorious, giving light to the dry,
sweet-scented haze of autumn air. Trenholme looked out on a neat garden
plot, and beyond, in the same enclosure, upon lawns of ragged,
dry-looking grass, in the centre of which stood an ugly brick house,
built apparently for some public purpose. This was the immediate
outlook. Around, the land was undulating; trees were abundant, and were
more apparent in the moonlight than the flat field spaces between them.
The graceful lines of leafless elms at the side of the main road were
clearly seen. About half a mile away the lights of a large village were
visible, but bits of walls and gable ends of white houses stood out
brighter in the moonlight than, the yellow lights within the windows.
Where the houses stretched themselves up on a low hill, a little white
church showed clear against the broken shadow of low-growing pines.

As Trenholme was surveying the place dreamily in the wonderful light,
that light fell also, upon him and his habitation. He was apparently
intellectual, and had in him something of the idealist. For the rest, he
was a good-sized, good-looking man, between thirty and forty years of
age, and even by the moonlight one might see, from the form of his
clothes, that he was dre