nd this out too late, and I came here to try to remedy it, but I
can't. No one can. You get your mind into a condition where the
ordinary routine of study is an impossibility, and you cannot go back
and take up the train you have laid, so you keep struggling on wasting
your energy, hoping against hope. Then suddenly you find out that you
are and can be only third- or at best second-rate. God, what a discovery
it is! How you try to fight it off until the last moment! But it comes
upon you surely and crushingly, and, cut, bruised, wounded, you slip
away from the face of the world. If you are a brave man, you say boldly
to yourself, 'I will eke out an existence in some humble way,' and you
go away to a life of longing and regret. If you are a coward, you either
leap over the parapets of life to hell, or go creeping back and fall at
the feet of the thing that has damned you, willing to be third-rate,
anything; for you are stung with the poison that never leaves your
blood. So it has been with me: even when I found that I must choose a
calling, I chose the one that gave me most time to nurse the serpent
that had stung me."

Taylor ceased speaking, and looked a little ashamed of his vehemence.

"This is your story," said Brent; "but men differ and conditions
differ. I will accept all the misery, all the pain and defeat you have
suffered, to be free to choose my own course."

Taylor threw up his hands with a deprecatory gesture. "There," he said;
"it is always so. I might as well have talked to the wind."

So the fitful calms and Elizabeth's love had not cured Frederick Brent's
heart of its one eating disease, the desire for freedom.

CHAPTER XI

It was not until early in Brent's second year at the Bible Seminary that
he was compelled to go through the ordeal he so much dreaded, that of
filling a city pulpit. The Dexterites had been wont to complain that
since the advent among them of the theological school their churches had
been turned into recitation-rooms for the raw students; but of "old Tom
Brent's boy," as they still called him, they could never make this
complaint. So, as humanity loves to grumble, the congregations began to
find fault because he did not do as his fellows did.

The rumours of his prowess in the class-room and his eloquence in the
society hall had not abated, and the curiosity of his fellow-townsmen
had been whetted to a point where endurance was no longer possible.
Indeed, it is open to