't you go and see Mrs. Johns? You needn't tell her anything
unless you want to. She has performed some perfectly wonderful cures."

"What can Mrs. Johns do for me?" asked Eugene bitterly, his lip set in
an ironic mould. "Cure me of gloom? Make my heart cease to ache? What's
the use of talking? I ought to quit the whole thing." He stared at the
floor.

"She can't, but God can. Oh, Eugene, I know how you feel! Please go. It
can't do you any harm. I'll bring you the book tomorrow. Will you read
it if I bring it to you?"

"No."

"Oh, Eugene, please for my sake."

"What good will it do? I don't believe in it. I can't. I'm too
intelligent to take any stock in that rot."

"Eugene, how you talk! You'll change your mind some time. I know how you
think. But read it anyhow. Will you please? Promise me you will. I
shouldn't ask. It isn't the way, but I want you to look into it. Go and
see Mrs. Johns."

Eugene refused. Of asinine things this seemed the silliest. Christian
Science! Christian rot! He knew what to do. His conscience was dictating
that he give up Suzanne and return to Angela in her hour of need--to his
coming child, for the time being anyhow, but this awful lure of beauty,
of personality, of love--how it tugged at his soul! Oh, those days with
Suzanne in the pretty watering and dining places about New York, those
hours of bliss when she looked so beautiful! How could he get over that?
How give up the memory? She was so sweet. Her beauty so rare. Every
thought of her hurt. It hurt so badly that most of the time he dared not
think--must, perforce, walk or work or stir restlessly about agonized
for fear he should think too much. Oh, life; oh, hell!

The intrusion of Christian Science into his purview just now was due, of
course, to the belief in and enthusiasm for that religious idea on the
part of Myrtle and her husband. As at Lourdes and St. Anne de Beau Pre
and other miracle-working centres, where hope and desire and religious
enthusiasm for the efficacious intervention of a superior and
non-malicious force intervenes, there had occurred in her case an actual
cure from a very difficult and complicated physical ailment. She had
been suffering from a tumor, nervous insomnia, indigestion, constipation
and a host of allied ills, which had apparently refused to yield to
ordinary medical treatment. She was in a very bad way mentally and
physically at the time the Christian Science textbook, "Science and
Health, with