urely that I must do this--that it is my reason for being--now that
life has taken the greater joy of home from me. So," she concludes
solemnly; "these people whom I love, they need me, but father, God and
you only know how I need them. I don't know about Grant,--I mean why he
is going his solitary way, but perhaps somewhere in his heart there is a
wound! Perhaps all of God's fools--those who live queer, unnormal
self-forgetting lives, are the broken and rejected pieces of life's
masonry which the builder is using in his own wise way. As for the plan,
it is not ours. Grant and I, broken spawl in the rising edifice, we and
thousands like us, odd pieces that chink in yet hold the strain--we must
be content to hold the load and know always--always know that after all
the wall is rising! That is enough."

And now we must put aside the pictures and get on with the story.

CHAPTER XXX

GRANT ADAMS PREACHING A MESSAGE OF LOVE RAISES THE VERY DEVIL IN HARVEY

The most dramatic agency in life is time--time that escapes the staged
drama. The passing years, the ceaseless chiselling of continuous events
upon a soul, the reaction of a creed upon the material routine of the
days, the humdrum living through of life that brings to it its final
color and form--these things shape us and guide us, make us what we are,
and alas, the story and the stage may only mention them. It is all very
fine to say that as the years of work and aspiration passed, Grant
Adams's channel of life grew narrower. But what does that tell? Does it
tell of the slow, daily sculpturing upon his character of the three big,
emotional episodes of his life? To be a father in boyhood, a father
ashamed, yet in duty bound to love and cherish his child; to face death
in youth horribly and escape only when other men's courage save him; to
react upon that experience in a great spiritual awakening that all but
touched madness; and to face unspeakable pain and terror and possible
death to justify one's fanatic consecration. Then day by day to renounce
ambition, to feel no desire for those deeper things of the heart that
gather about a home and the joys of a home; to be atrophied where others
are quick and to be supersensitive and highstrung where others are dull;
these are facts of Grant Adams's life, but the greater facts are hidden;
for they pass under the slow and inexorably moving current of life. They
are that part of the living through of life that may not be