although he knew he was
wrong. Shame put her brand on his heart, and his face showed to those
who watched it closely--and there were scores of fellow-gamblers at
the game with him, whose profits came from watching his face--his
face showed forth uncertainty and daze. So men said, "The old man's
off his feed," or others said, "Barclay's losing his nerve"; and still
others said, "Can it be possible that the old hypocrite is getting a
sort of belated conscience?"

But slowly, inch by inch, the child within him grew; he gripped his
soul with the iron hand of will that had made a man of him, and when
the child fell and ached with shame, Barclay's will sustained the
weakling. We are so hidden by our masks that this struggle in the
man's soul, though guessed at by some of those about him, was unknown
to the hundreds who saw him every day. But for him the universe had
changed. And as a child, amazed, he looked upon the new wonder of
God's order about him and went tripping and stumbling and toppling
over awkwardly through it all as one learning some new equilibrium.
There were times when his heart grew sick, and he would have given it
all up. There were hours when he did surrender; when he did a mean
thing and gloried in it, or a cowardly thing and apologized for it.
But his will rose and turned him back to his resolve. He found the big
things easy, and the little things hard to do. So he kept at the big
things until they had pushed him so far toward his goal that the
little things were details which he repaired slowly and with anguish
of humiliation in secret, and unknown even to those who were nearest
to him.

And all this struggle was behind the hard face, under the broad, high
forehead, back of the mean jaw, beneath the cover of the sharp brazen
eyes. Even in Sycamore Ridge they did not suspect the truth until
Barclay had grown so strong in his new faith that he could look at his
yesterdays without shuddering.

The year of our Lord nineteen hundred and six was a slow year
politically in Sycamore Ridge, so in the parliament at McHurdie's shop
discussion took somewhat wider range than was usual. It may interest
metaphysicians in the world at large to know that the McHurdie
parliament that August definitely decided that this is not a material
world; that sensation is a delusion, that the whole phantasmagoria of
the outer and material world is a reaction of some sort upon the
individual consciousness. Up to this point the m