which had grown
up in that strange temperament. He found something very pathetic in
that picture she had drawn of herself in forecast, roaming disconsolate
through her rooms the livelong night, unable to sleep. The woful moan of
insomnia seemed to make itself heard in every strain from her piano.

Alice heard it also, but being unillumined, she missed the romantic
pathos. "I call it disgraceful," she muttered from her pillow, "for
folks to be banging away on a piano at this time of night. There ought
to be a law to prevent it."

"It may be some distressed soul," said Theron, gently, "seeking relief
from the curse of sleeplessness."

The wife laughed, almost contemptuously. "Distressed fiddlesticks!" was
her only other comment.

The music went on for a long time--rising now to strident heights, now
sinking off to the merest tinkling murmur, and broken ever and again by
intervals of utter hush. It did not prevent Alice from at once falling
sound asleep; but Theron lay awake, it seemed to him, for hours,
listening tranquilly, and letting his mind wander at will through the
pleasant antechambers of Sleep, where are more unreal fantasies than
Dreamland itself affords.

PART II

CHAPTER XI

For some weeks the Rev. Theron Ware saw nothing of either the priest or
the doctor, or the interesting Miss Madden.

There were, indeed, more urgent matters to think about. June had come;
and every succeeding day brought closer to hand the ordeal of his first
Quarterly Conference in Octavius. The waters grew distinctly rougher as
his pastoral bark neared this difficult passage.

He would have approached the great event with an easier mind if he could
have made out just how he stood with his congregation. Unfortunately
nothing in his previous experiences helped him in the least to measure
or guess at the feelings of these curious Octavians. Their Methodism
seemed to be sound enough, and to stick quite to the letter of the
Discipline, so long as it was expressed in formulae. It was its spirit
which he felt to be complicated by all sorts of conditions wholly novel
to him.

The existence of a line of street-cars in the town, for example, would
not impress the casual thinker as likely to prove a rock in the path of
peaceful religion. Theron, in his simplicity, had even thought, when he
first saw these bobtailed cars bumping along the rails in the middle of
the main street, that they must be a great convenience to peo