tion he might not have
thought of his present enterprise. The bleak face kept smiling, but the
Prime Minister was asking himself: "What does this mean? Has she _her
own_ reasons for wishing to go away?"

"Do you know, my boy, that with all this talk you've not yet told me who
she is?"

John told him, and then a faint and far-off rumour out of another world
seemed to flit across his memory.

"An actress at present, you say?"

"So to speak, but ready to give up everything for this glorious mission."

"Very brave, no doubt, very beautiful; but what of your present
responsibilities--your responsibilities in London?"

"That's just what I came to speak about," said John; and then his
rapturous face straightened, and he made some effort to plunge into the
practical aspect of his affairs at Soho. There was his club for girls and
his home for children. They were to be turned out of the clergy-house
tomorrow, and he had taken a shelter at Westminster. But the means to
support them were still deficient, and if there was anything coming to
him that would suffice for that purpose--if there was enough left--if his
mother's money was not all gone----

The Prime Minister was looking into John's face, watching the play of his
features, but hardly listening to what he said. "What does this mean?" he
was asking himself, in the old habitual way of the man whose business it
is to read the motives that are not revealed.

"So you are willing to leave London, after all, John?"

"Why not, uncle? London is nothing to me in itself, less than nothing;
and if that brave girl to whom it is everything----"

"And yet six months ago I gave you the opportunity of doing so, and
then----"

"Then my head was full of dreams, sir. Thank God, they are gone now, and
I am awake at last!"

"But the Church--I thought your duty and devotion to the Church----"

"The Church is a chaos, uncle, a wreck of fragments without unity,
principle, or life. No man can find foothold in it now without
accommodating his duty and his loyalty to his chances of a livelihood. It
is a career, not a crusade. Once I imagined that a man might live as a
protest against all this, but it was a dream, a vain and presumptuous
dream."

"And then your woman movement----"

"Another dream, uncle! A whole standing army marshalled and equipped to
do battle against the world's sins toward woman could never hope for
victory. Why? Because the enemy is ourselves, and only God can co