ethods threatened socialism and anarchy. He
could have demolished all General Booth's pet theories by an appeal to
the simplest logical processes, but that it seemed absurd to apply
logic to so crude a scheme. "Nevertheless," said conscience, "these
people are striving, however blunderingly, to better the condition of
the forlorn, the wicked, and the wretched. What are _you_ doing about
it?" He had almost framed a defence, when it suddenly occurred to him
that he was under no accusations, except from his own soul, and such
thoughts and impulses as had arisen at sight of Nora Costello, moving
in the world outside the social wall behind which he had intrenched
himself.

"I suppose," he said to himself, with a shrug, "if I were living in
the Massachusetts of a hundred years ago, I should be considered in a
hopeful way to conversion. Now, we have learned just how far we may
indulge an emotion, without allowing it to eventuate in action."

Yet the passing of Nora Costello, like the passing of Pippa in the
poem, had left its light, ineffaceable touch on at least one life that
night.

CHAPTER XIII

A SOLDIER

"'T was August, and the fierce sun overhead
Smote on the squalid streets of Bethnal Green;
And the pale weaver, through his windows seen
In Spitalfields, look'd thrice dispirited.

"I met a preacher there I knew, and said:
'Ill and o'erworked, how fare you in this scene?'
'Bravely!' he said; 'for I of late have been
Much cheered with thoughts of Christ, the _living bread_.'"

Nora Costello was even more moved than Flint by their chance meeting,
if meeting it could be called, under the white light of the lamps of
Madison Square. On leaving Nepaug, she had resolutely shut out of her
mental horizon the acquaintances that she had made in her few days
there. She felt instinctively that any further continuance of the
associations would be fraught with embarrassing complications, if not
actual perils. These people belonged to a world to which she was as
dead as though she had taken the black veil in a convent.

As the daughter of the manse, in her young girlhood she had come in
contact with people of refinement and some wealth; people of keen
perceptions if somewhat pronounced limitations; and she realized that
in enlisting in the Salvation Army, she had not only shocked their
prejudices beyond repa