ble
to link them to so sordid a thing as this question of gate-money. When
he had finished, nobody wanted the gates opened. The two factions found
that the difference between them had melted out of existence. They sat
entranced by the charm of the sermon; then, glancing around at the empty
benches, glaringly numerous in the afternoon sunlight, they whispered
regrets that ten thousand people had not been there to hear that
marvellous discourse. Theron's conquest was of exceptional dimensions.
The majority, whose project he had defeated, were strangers who
appreciated and admired his effort most. The little minority of his own
flock, though less susceptible to the influence of graceful diction
and delicately balanced rhetoric, were proud of the distinction he had
reflected upon them, and delighted with him for having won their
fight. The Presiding Elders wrung his hand with a significant grip. The
extremists of his own charge beamed friendship upon him for the first
time. He was the veritable hero of the week.

The prestige of this achievement made it the easier for Theron to get
away by himself next day, and walk in the woods. A man of such power
had a right to solitude. Those who noted his departure from the camp
remembered with pleasure that he was to preach again on the morrow.
He was going to commune with God in the depths of the forest, that the
Message next day might be clearer and more luminous still.

Theron strolled for a little, with an air of aimlessness, until he was
well outside the more or less frequented neighborhood of the camp.
Then he looked at the sun and the lay of the land with that informing
scrutiny of which the farm-bred boy never loses the trick, turned, and
strode at a rattling pace down the hillside. He knew nothing personally
of this piece of woodland--a spur of the great Adirondack wilderness
thrust southward into the region of homesteads and dairies and
hop-fields--but he had prepared himself by a study of the map, and
he knew where he wanted to go. Very Soon he hit upon the path he had
counted upon finding, and at this he quickened his gait.

Three months of the new life had wrought changes in Theron. He bore
himself more erectly, for one thing; his shoulders were thrown back, and
seemed thicker. The alteration was even more obvious in his face. The
effect of lank, wistful, sallow juvenility had vanished. It was the
countenance of a mature, well-fed, and confident man, firmer and more
ro