eep it to share it
with our brethren in love, or shall we guard it against our brethren in
hate?"

He walked back to the rear of the room and sat, with his head bowed
down, beside his friends, spent and weary while the services closed.

At the church door Laura Van Dorn saw the despair that was somewhat a
physical reaction from weariness. So she cut her way through the group
and went to him, taking his arm and drawing him aside into the homebound
walk, as quickly as she could. He remained grim and spoke only in answer
to challenge or question from Laura. It was plain to her that he felt
that his speech was a failure; that he had not made himself understood;
that he had overstated his case. She was not sure herself that he had
not lost more ground than he had gained in the town. But she wrapped him
about in a garment of kindness--an almost maternal tenderness that was
balm to his heart. She did not praise his speech but she let him know
that she was proud of him, that her heart was in all that he had said,
even if he felt definitely that there were places in his adventure where
her head was not ready to go. She held no check upon the words that came
to her lips, for she felt, even deeper and surer than she felt her own
remoteness from the love which her girlhood had known, that in him it
was forever dead. No touch of his hand; no look of his eye, no quality
of his voice had come to her since her childhood, in which she could
find trace or suggestion that sex was alive in him. The ardor that
burned so wildly upon his face, the fire in his eyes that glowed when he
spoke of his work and his problems, seemed to have charred within him
all flower and beauty of romance. But they left with him a hunger for
sympathy. A desire to be mothered and a longing for a deep and sweet
understanding which made Laura more and more necessary to him as he went
into his life's pilgrimage. As they reached a corner, he left her with
her family while he turned away for a night walk.

As he walked, he was continually coming upon lovers passing or meeting
him in the night; and Grant seeing them felt his sense of isolation from
life renewed, but was not stirred to change his course. For hours he
wandered through the town and out of it into the prairies, with his
heart heavy and wroth at the iniquities of men which make the inequities
of life. For his demon kept him from sleep. If another demon, and
perhaps a gentler, tried to whisper to him that n