d Health," and opened it aimlessly. Then he
thought for curiosity's sake he would see where he had opened it--what
the particular page or paragraph his eye fell on had to say to him. He
was still intensely superstitious. He looked, and here was this
paragraph growing under his eyes:

"When mortal man blends his thoughts of existence with the spiritual,
and works only as God works, he will no longer grope in the dark and
cling to earth because he has not tasted heaven. Carnal beliefs defraud
us. They make man an involuntary hypocrite--producing evil when he would
create good, forming deformity when he would outline grace and beauty,
injuring those whom he would bless. He becomes a general mis-creator,
who believes he is a semi-God. His touch turns hope to dust, the dust we
all have trod. He might say in Bible language, 'The good that I would, I
do not, but evil, which I would not, I do.'"

He closed the book and meditated. He wished he might realize this thing
if this were so. Still he did not want to become a religionist--a
religious enthusiast. How silly they were. He picked up his daily
paper--the _Evening Post_--and there on an inside page quoted in an
obscure corner was a passage from a poem by the late Francis Thompson,
entitled "The Hound of Heaven." It began:

"I fled Him, down the nights and down the days;
I fled Him, down the arches of the years ...

The ending moved him strangely:

Still with unhurrying chase,
And unperturbed face
Deliberate speed, majestic instancy
Came on the following Feet,
And a voice above their beat--
"Naught shelters thee, who wilt not shelter Me."

Did this man really believe this? Was it so?

He turned back to his book and read on, and by degrees he came half to
believe that sin and evil and sickness might possibly be illusions--that
they could be cured by aligning one's self intellectually and
spiritually with this Divine Principle. He wasn't sure. This terrible
sense of wrong. Could he give up Suzanne? Did he want to? No!

He got up and went to the window and looked out. The snow was still
blowing.

"Give her up! Give her up!" And Angela in such a precarious condition.
What a devil of a hole he was in, anyway! Well, he would go and see her
in the morning. He would at least be kind. He would see her through this
thing. He lay down and tried to sleep, but somehow sleep never came to
him right any more. He was too wearied, too distressed, too wrought