e committee
couldn't help accepting it.

"I think," he told himself often, "I have reached the point where I can
do something really worth while."

One night when he had gone reluctantly to bed, sleep would not come.
For a long while he lay staring at a white patch of moonlight on the
floor.

Suddenly he sat up, sprang out of bed and, still in his pajamas, sat
down before his easel.

In the morning Shirley found him there, looking raptly at the completed
sketch.

"David Quentin, what in the name of common sense are you doing here?"

"Look!" he whispered, almost in awe. "This is it."

Shirley looked. And she, who had picked up a little knowledge of
architecture from him, knew that it was good.

"Do you think," she asked, "do you think it really has a chance?"

"Shirley, it's so good I can hardly believe it came out of my head.
Maybe it didn't, but just passed through coming from--somewhere."

He was thinking it was an inspiration. . . . Well, since then many men
who ought to know have thought and said the same thing about that
church.

For two months he toiled every spare moment of the day and in the still
watches of the night, elaborating that first rough sketch, working out
details, which came to him as of their own accord, making beautiful
plans and elevations and long sheets of specifications. He gave to the
work enthusiasm, patience and stern criticism. In return it gave him a
new faith in himself. And hope. He _knew_ he would not fail in this.

It was not really hard work. For, as the weeks sped by, there grew up
in his heart a love for the thing to which he was giving birth, deep,
warm and abiding, a love that counted no hour of labor too heavy, no
task too exacting. He did not care to think of the day when the work
must pass out of his hands.

A little of his ardor entered into Shirley. She, too, hoped. She
thought of the fee such a commission would bring, of the release from
care and the good times that fee would buy. Sometimes she had a
glimpse of the new love growing up in David's heart, but, though she
did not wholly like that, she gave it no serious thought.

"Would you mind coming back to me?" she asked one evening, thus
bringing him out of a smiling brown study.

"I was just thinking what it would feel like to see the church _real_."

"Don't you ever think of the money it will bring?"

"That, too, sometimes. But I never knew before how much the work--just
being in it, you