d frivolous. It was amused at the
people. It rippled with laughter at the preacher's heavy effort to start
a jealousy between the pangs of the flesh and the pangs of the soul.

It brought into church a savor of green rushes growing in the warm, wet
thickets where Doctor Crosson--once Eddie Crosson--had loved to go
hunting squirrels and rabbits, and wild duck in season. Those were years
of depravity, but they were entrancing in memory. He felt a Satanic
whisper: "Order these old fogies out into the fields and let them
worship there. It is May, you fool!"

"You fool!" That was what Irene Straley had seemed to whisper. Only, the
breeze made a soft, sweet coo of the word that had been so bitter on her
lips.

Across the square of a window near the pulpit a venerable locust-tree
brandished a bough dripping with blossoms. Countless little censers of
white spice swung frankincense and myrrh for pagan nostrils.

There was a beckoning in the locust bough, and in the air an incantation
that made a folly of sermons and souls and old maids' resentments and
gossips' queries. The preacher fought on, another Saint Anthony in a
cloud of witches.

He could hear himself intoning the long sermon with the familiar
pulpiteering rhythms and the final upsnap of the last syllable of each
sentence. He could see that the congregation was already drowsily
forgetful of Irene Straley's absence. But, to save his soul, he could
not keep his mind from following her out into the leafy streets and on
into the past where she had been the prize he and young Drury Boldin had
contended for--a past in which he had never dreamed that his future was
a pulpit in his home town.

He was the manlier of the two, for Drury was a delicate boy, too
sensitive for the approval of his Spartan fellows. They made fun of his
gentleness. He hated to wreathe a fishing-worm on a hook! He loathed to
wrench a hook from a fish's gullet! The nearest he had ever come to
fighting was in defense of a thousand-legged worm that one of the boys
had stuck a pin through, to watch it writhe and bite itself behind the
pin.

Irene Straley was a sentimental girl. That was right in a girl, but
silly in a boy.

Once when Eddie Crosson stubbed his toe and it swelled up to great
importance, Irene Straley wept when she saw it, while Drury Boldin
turned pale and sat down hard. Once when Drury cut his thumb with a
penknife he fainted at the sight of his own blood!

Eddie Crosson was a rea