atience to finish it, but one of the sales-ladies there,
who was an expert, told me it was pretty good: She taught me the stitch,
and I had a notion at that time I might make a little money for dresses
and the theatre. I was always clever with my hands."

"The very thing!" he said, with hopeful emphasis. "I'm sure I can get
you plenty of it to do. And I'll come back in the morning."

He gave it back to her, and as she was folding it his glance fell on a
photograph in the basket.

"I kept it, I don't know why," he heard her say; "I didn't have the heart
to burn it."

He started recovered himself, and rose.

"I'll go to see the agent the first thing to-morrow," he said. "And
then--you'll be ready for me? You trust me?"

"I'd do anything for you," was her tremulous reply.

Her disquieting, submissive smile haunted him as he roped his way down
the stairs to the street, and then the face in the photograph replaced
it--the laughing eyes, the wilful, pleasure--loving mouth he had seen in
the school and college pictures of Preston Parr.

THE INSIDE OF THE CUP

By Winston Churchill

Volume 5.

XVII. RECONSTRUCTION
XVIII. THE RIDDLE OF CAUSATION
XIX. MR. GOODRICH BECOMES A PARTISAN

CHAPTER XVII

RECONSTRUCTION

I

Life had indeed become complicated, paradoxical. He, John Hodder, a
clergyman, rector of St. John's by virtue of not having resigned, had
entered a restaurant of ill repute, had ordered champagne for an
abandoned woman, and had no sense of sin when he awoke the next morning!
The devil, in the language of orthodox theology, had led him there. He
had fallen under the influence of the tempter of his youth, and all in
him save the carnal had been blotted out.

More paradoxes! If the devil had not taken possession of him and led him
there, it were more than probable that he could never have succeeded in
any other way in getting on a footing of friendship with this woman, Kate
Marcy. Her future, to be sure, was problematical. Here was no simple,
sentimental case he might formerly have imagined, of trusting innocence
betrayed, but a mixture of good and evil, selfishness and unselfishness.
And she had, in spite of all, known the love which effaces self! Could
the disintegration, in her case, be arrested?

Gradually Hodder was filled with a feeling which may be called amazement
because, although his brain was no nearer to a solution than before, he
was not despondent. For a m