ith heads enough to
wonder at it.

It happened from time to time, this mysterious retreat into the moors,
more frequently as the Infield Conference drew on and the hollows
deepened in the minister's cheeks and his eyes shone brighter with
foreboding. Nor was this the first time the back-country had been
mentioned in the same breath with the Wilderness of Judea. I can
remember our Miss Beedie, in Sunday School, lifting her eyes and sighing
at the first verse of the fourth chapter of the Book of Luke.

And to-night, while I crept off tingling through the dark of Lovett's
Court, he was in the Wilderness again, and I had seen him last.

I brought up by one of the tubbed box-trees and peered in at the Pillar
House with a new wonder. I was so used to it there, dead on the outside
and living on the inside, that I had never learned to think of it as a
strange thing. Perhaps a dozen times I had seen little Hope Gibbs (they
still said "Gibbs") playing quietly among the lilacs in the back yard.
It was always at dusk when the shadows were long there, and she a shadow
among them, so unobtrusive and far away. As for her mother, no one ever
saw Sympathy Gibbs.

Crouching by the box-tree, I found myself wondering what they were doing
in there, Sympathy Gibbs and the little girl; whether they were
sleeping, or whether they were sitting in the dark, thinking, or
whispering about the husband and father who was neither husband nor
father, or whether, in some remote chamber, there might not be a lamp or
a candle burning.

The dead hush of the place oppressed me. I turned my head to look back
at the comfortable, bumbling devotion of Center Church, and this is what
I saw there.

The door was still open, a blank, bright rectangle giving into the
deserted vestry, and it was against this mat of light that I spied
Minister Malden's head and shoulders thrust furtively, as he peeped in
and seemed to harken to the muffled unison of the prayer.

You may imagine me startled enough at that, but what of my emotion
when, having peeped and listened and reassured himself for a dozen
seconds, Minister Malden turned and came softly down the Court toward
the gate and the box-trees and me, a furtive silhouette against the
door-light, his face turned back over one shoulder.

I couldn't bolt; he was too close for that. The wonder was that he
failed to see me, for he stopped within two yards of where I cowered in
the shadow and stood for a long time gaz