now. Just take it from
me, as the song says, 'that things have changed since Willie died.'
That's all. And then come back here, and this afternoon we'll have a
good old-fashioned jaw."

The Rev. Mr. Ware, walking with ostentatious feebleness, and forcing
a conventional smile upon his wan face, duly made his unexpected
appearance at the trustees' meeting in one of the smaller classrooms. He
received their congratulations gravely, and shook hands with all three.
It required an effort to do this impartially, because, upon sight of
Levi Gorringe, there rose up suddenly within him an emotion of fierce
dislike and enmity. In some enigmatic way his thoughts had kept
themselves away from Gorringe ever since Sunday evening. Now they
concentrated with furious energy and swiftness upon him. Theron
seemed able in a flash of time to coordinate many recollections of
Gorringe--the early liking Alice had professed for him, the mystery of
those purchased plants in her garden, the story of the girl he had lost
in church, his offer to lend him money, the way in which he had sat
beside Alice at the love-feast and followed her to the altar-rail in
the evening. These raced abreast through the young minister's brain, yet
with each its own image, and its relation to the others clearly defined.

He found the nerve, all the same, to take this third trustee by the
hand, and to thank him for his congratulations, and even to say, with a
surface smile of welcome, "It is BROTHER Gorringe, now, I remember."

The work before the meeting was chiefly of a routine kind. In most
places this would have been transacted by the stewards; but in Octavius
these minor officials had degenerated into mere ceremonial abstractions,
who humbly ratified, or by arrangement anticipated, the will of the
powerful, mortgage-owning trustees. Theron sat languidly at the head
of the table while these common-place matters passed in their course,
noting the intonations of Gorringe's voice as he read from his
secretary's book, and finding his ear displeased by them. No issue arose
upon any of these trivial affairs, and the minister, feeling faint
and weary in the heat, wondered why Sister Soulsby had insisted on his
coming.

All at once he sat up straight, with an instinctive warning in his
mind that here was the thing. Gorringe had taken up the subject of the
"debt-raising" evening, and read out its essentials as they had been
embodied in a report of the stewards. The gross