that elevated not the Lust that pulled down.
The example nerved him like fresh air. The pain that had dumbed his
thoughts of Nellie passed from him.

"He is a man!" cried Ned.

"That wasn't all," went on Connie, taking the case from his hands and
officiously dusting it with her handkerchief. "When she was pining for
him, dying of grief, because she had lost her strength in her illness,
they offered him his liberty if he would deny the Cause, if he would
recant, if he would say he had been fooled and misled and desired to
redeem his position. They let him hear all about her and then they
tempted him. They wanted to disgust the people with their leaders. But it
wasn't right to do that. It was shameful. It makes me wild to think of it
yet. The way it was done! To torture a man so through his love! Oh, the
wretches! The miserable dogs! I'd----" Connie broke off suddenly to put
the handkerchief to her indignant eyes. The thunderstorm of her anger
burst in rain. She was a thorough woman. "I suppose they didn't know any
better, as he always says of everybody that's mean. It's some consolation
to think that they overshot the mark, though," she concluded, tearfully.

"How?"

"How! Why if they had let Geisner go and everybody else, there'd be no
martyrs to keep the Cause going. Even Geisner, if his wife had lived,
poor girl, and if children had grown up, could hardly be quite the same,
don't you know. As it is he only lives for the Cause. He has nothing else
to live for. They crushed his weakness out of him and fitted him to turn
round and crush them."

"It's time he began," remarked Ned, thoughtfully.

"He has begun."

"Where?"

"Everywhere. In you, in me, in Nellie, in men like Ford and George and
Harry, in places you never dream of, in ways nobody knows but himself. He
is moulding the world as a potter moulds clay. It frightens me,
sometimes. I open a new book and there are Geisner's very ideas. I see a
picture, an illustrated paper, and there is Geisner's hand passed to
another. I was at a new opera the other night and I could hardly believe
my ears; it seemed as though Geisner was playing. From some out of the
way corner of the earth comes news of a great strike; then, on top of it,
from another corner, the bubbling of a gathering rising; and I can feel
that Geisner is guiding countless millions to some unseen goal, safe in
his work because none know him. He is a man! He seeks no reward, despises
fame, instils no