d. The
thought came to him: was he indeed greater, more vital than the religion
he professed? God forbid! Did he ring true, and it false?

She returned his gaze. And gradually, under her clear olive skin, he saw
the crimson colour mounting higher . . . . She put forth her hand,
simply, naturally, and pressed his own, as though they had been friends
for a lifetime . . . .

CHAPTER X

THE MESSENGER IN THE CHURCH

I

The annual scourge of summer had descended pitilessly upon the city once
more, enervating, depressing, stagnating, and people moved languidly in
the penetrating heat that steamed from the pores of the surrounding river
bottoms.

The rector of St. John's realized that a crisis had come in his life,
--a crisis he had tried to stave off in vain. And yet there was a period
during which he pursued his shrunken duties as though nothing had
happened to him; as a man who has been struck in battle keeps on, loath
to examine, to acknowledge the gravity of his wound; fearing to, perhaps.
Sometimes, as his mind went back to the merciless conflict of his past,
his experience at the law school, it was the unchaining of that other man
he dreaded, the man he believed himself to have finally subdued. But
night and day he was haunted by the sorrowful and reproachful face of
Truth.

Had he the courage, now, to submit the beliefs which had sustained him
all these years to Truth's inexorable inspection? Did he dare to turn
and open those books which she had inspired,--the new philosophies, the
historical criticisms which he had neglected and condemned, which he had
flattered himself he could do without,--and read of the fruit of
Knowledge? Twice, thrice he had hesitated on the steps of the big
library, and turned away with a wildly beating heart.

Day by day the storm increased, until from a cloud on the horizon it
grew into a soul-shaking tempest. Profoundly moved Parr's he had been on
that Sunday afternoon, in Eldon Parr's garden, he had resolutely resolved
to thrust the woman and the incident from his mind, to defer the
consideration of the questions she had raised--grave though they were--to
a calmer period. For now he was unable to separate her, to eliminate the
emotion--he was forced to acknowledge--the thought of her aroused, from
the problems themselves. Who was she? At moments he seemed to see her
shining, accusing, as Truth herself, and again as a Circe who had drawn
him by subtle arts from his wanderi