ell! do you hear?" He caught her by the arm and shook
her. "And I deserve hell! Hell! Hell! Fools! no hell?" He turned again
to her. "And for you, for this, and this, and this," touching her
hair, her cheek, and her heaving bosom with his finger, "I have lost my
brother--my brother--my own brother--Barney. Oh, fool that I am! Damned!
Damned! Damned!"

She shrank back from him, then whispered with pale lips, "Oh, Dick,
spare me! Take me home!"

"Yes, yes," he cried in mad haste, "anywhere, in the devil's name! Come!
Come!" He seized her wrap, threw it upon her shoulders, caught up his
hat, tore open the door for her, and followed her out.

"Can a man take fire into his bosom and not be burned?" And out of the
embers of his passion there kindled a fire that night that burned with
unquenchable fury for many a day.

XV

THE SUPERINTENDENT'S METHODS

The Superintendent was spending the precious hours of one of his rare
visits at home in painful plodding through his correspondence. For it
was part of the sacrifice his work demanded, and which he cheerfully
made, that he should forsake home and wife and children for his work's
sake. The Assembly's Convener found him in the midst of an orderly
confusion of papers of different sorts.

"How do you do, sir?" The Superintendent's voice had a fine burr about
it that gripped the ear, and his hand a vigour and tenacity of hold
that gripped the outstretched hand of the Assembly's Convener and nearly
brought the little man to the floor. "Sit down, sir, and listen to this.
Here are some of the compensations that go with the Superintendent's
office. This is rich. It comes from my friend, Henry Fink, of the
Columbia Forks in the Windermere Valley. British Columbia, you
understand," noticing the Convener's puzzled expression. "I visited the
valley a year ago and found a truly deplorable condition of things.
Men had gone up there many years ago and settled down remote from
civilization. Some of them married Indian wives and others of them
ought to have married them, and they have brought up families in the
atmosphere and beliefs of the pagans. Would you believe it, I fell in
with a young man on the trail, twenty years of age, who had never heard
the name of our Saviour except in oaths? He had never heard the story of
the Cross. And there are many others like him. At the Columbia Forks the
only institution that stands for things intellectual is a Freethinkers'
Club, the presi