Transcriber’s Note:

The cover image was created by the transcriber and is placed in the public domain.

The Ball of Fire

For an instant the brown eyes and the blue ones met

The Ball of Fire

By

George Randolph Chester

and

Lillian Chester

Illustrated

Hearst’s International Library Co.

New York                      1914

Copyright, 1914, by

The Red Book Corporation

Copyright, 1914, by

Hearst’s International Library Co., Inc.

All Rights reserved, including the translation into foreign languages, including the Scandinavian.

CONTENTS

ILLUSTRATIONS

The Ball of Fire

CHAPTER I
NO PLACE FOR SENTIMENT

Silence pervaded the dim old aisles of Market Square Church; a silence which seemed to be palpable; a solemn hush which wavered, like the ghostly echoes of anthems long forgotten, among the slender columns and the high arches and the delicate tracery of the groining; the winter sun, streaming through the clerestory windows, cast, on the floor and on the vacant benches, patches of ruby and of sapphire, of emerald and of topaz, these seeming only to accentuate the dimness and the silence.

A thin, wavering, treble note, so delicate that it seemed like a mere invisible cobweb of a tone, stole out of the organ loft and went pulsing up amid the dim arches. It grew in volume; it added a diapason; a deep, soft bass joined it, and then, subdued, but throbbing with the passion of a lost soul, it swelled into one of the noble preludes of Bach. The organ rose in a mighty crescendo to a peal which shook the very edifice; then it stopped with an abruptness which was uncanny, so much so that the silence which ensued was oppressive. In that silence the vestry door creaked, it opened wide, and it was as if a vision had suddenly been set there! Framed in the dark doorway against the background of the sun-flooded vestry, bathed in the golden light from the transept window, brown-haired, brown-eyed, rosy-cheeked, stood a girl who might have been one of the slender stained-glass virgins come to life, the golden light flaming the edges of her hair into an oriole. She stood timidly, peering into the dimness, and on her beautifully curved lips was a half questioning smile.

“Uncle Jim,” she called, and there was some quality in her low voice which was strangely attractive; and disturbing.

“By George, Gail, I forgot that you were to come for me!” said Jim Sargent, rising from amid the group of men in the dim transept. “The decorators drove us out of the vestry.”

“They drove me out, too,” laughed the vision, stepping from her frame.

“We are delighted that they drove you in here,” quoth the tall, young Reverend Smith Boyd, who had accomplished the rare art of bowing gracefully in a Prince Albert.

She smiled her acknowledgment of the compliment, and glanced uncertainly at the awe-inspiring vestry meeting, then she turned toward the door.

“My niece, Miss Gail Sargent, gentlemen,” announced Jim Sargent, with entirely justifiable pride, and, beaming until his bald spot seemed to glow with an added shine, he introduced her to each of the gentlemen present, with the exception of Smith Boyd, whom she had met that morning.

“What a pity Saint Paul didn’t see you,” remarked silver-bearded Rufus Manning, calmly appropriating the vision and ushering her into the pew between himself and her uncle. “He never would have said it.”

“That women should not sit in council with the men?” she laughed, looking into the blue eyes of patriarchal Manning. “Are you sure I won’t be in the way?”

“Not at all,” round-headed old Nicholas Van Ploon immediately assured her. He had popped his eyes open with a jerk at the entrance of Gail, and had not since been able to close them to their normal almond shape. He sat now uncomfortably twisted so that he could face her, and his cheeks were reddening with the exertion, which had wrinkled his roundly filled vest. The young rector contemplated her gravely. He was not quite pleased.

“We’ll be through in a few minutes, Gail,” promised Jim Sargent. “Allison, you were about to prove something to us, I think,” and he leaned forward to smile across Gail at Rufus Manning.

“Prove is the right word,” agreed the stockily built man who had evidently been addressing the vestry. He was acutely conscious of the presence of Gail, as they all were. “Your rector suggests that this is a matter of sentiment. You are anxious to have fifty million dollars to begin the erection of a cathedral; but I came here to talk business, and that only. Granting you the full normal appreciation of your Vedder Court property, and the normal increase of your aggregate rentals, you can not have, at the end of ten years, a penny over forty-two millions. I am prepared to offer you, in cash, a sum which will, at three and a half per cent., and in ten years, produce that exact amount. To this I add two million.”

“How much did you allow for increase in the value of the property?” asked Nicholas Van Ploon, whose only knowledge for several generations had been centred on this one question. The original Van Ploon had bought a vast tract of Manhattan for a dollar an acre, and, by that stroke of towering genius, had placed the family of Van Ploon, for all eternity, beyond the necessity of thought.

For answer, Allison passed him the envelope upon which he had been figuring, checking off an item as he did so. He noticed that Gail’s lips twitched with suppressed mirth. She turned abruptly to look back at the striking transept window, and the three vestrymen in the rear pew immediately sat straighter. Willis Cunningham, who was a bachelor, hastily smoothed his Vandyke. He was so rich, by inheritance, that money meant nothing to him.

“Not enough,” grunted Van Ploon, handing back the envelope, and twisting again in the general direction of Gail.

“Ample,” retorted Allison. “You can’t count anything for the buildings. While I don’t deny that they yield the richest income of any property in the city, they are the most decrepit tenements in New York. They’ll fall down in less than ten years. You have them propped up now.”

Jim Sargent glanced solicitously at Gail, but she did not seem to be bored; not a particle!

“They are passed by the building inspector annually,” pompously stated W. T. Chisholm, his mutton chops turning pink from the reddening of the skin beneath. He had spent a lifetime in resenting indignities before they reached him.

“Building inspectors change,” insinuated Allison. “Politics is very uncertain.”

Four indignant vestrymen jerked forward to answer that insult.

“Gentlemen, this is a vestry meeting,” sternly reproved the Reverend Smith Boyd, advancing a step, and seeming to feel the need of a gavel. His rich, deep baritone explained why he was rector of the richest church in the world.

Gail’s eyes were dancing, but otherwise she was demureness itself as she studied, in turns, the members of the richest vestry in the world. She estimated that eight of the gentlemen then present were almost close enough to the anger line to swear. They numbered just eight, and they were most interesting! And this was a vestry meeting!

“The topic of debate was money, I believe,” suggested Manning, rescuing his sense of humour from somewhere in his beard. He was the infidel member. “Suppose we return to it. Is Allison’s offer worth considering?”

“Why?” inquired the nasal voice of clean-shaven old Joseph G. Clark, who was sarcastic in money matters. The Standard Cereal Company had attained its colossal dimensions through rebates; and he had invented the device! “The only reason we’d sell to Allison would be that we could get more money than by the normal return from our investment.”

The thinly spun treble note began once more, pulsing its timid way among the high, dim arches, as if seeking a lodgment where it might fasten its tiny thread of harmony, and grow into a masterful composition. A little old lady came slowly down the centre aisle of the nave, in rich but modest black, struggling, against her infirmities, to walk with a trace of the erect gracefulness of her bygone youth. Gail, listening raptly to the delicately increasing throb of the music, followed, in abstraction, the slow progress of the little old lady, who seemed to carry with her, for just a moment, a trace of the solemn hush belonging to that perspective of slender columns which spread their gracefully pointed arches up into the groined twilight, where the music hovered until it could gather strength to burst into full song. The little old lady turned her gaze for an instant to the group in the transept, and subconsciously gave the folds of her veil a touch; then she slipped into her pew, down near the altar, and raised her eyes to the exquisite Henri Dupres crucifix. She knelt, and bowed her forehead on her hands.

“I’ve allowed two million for the profit of Market Square Church in dealing with me,” stated Allison, again proffering the envelope which no one made a move to take. “I will not pay a dollar more.”

W. T. Chisholm was suddenly reminded that the vestry had a moral obligation in the matter under discussion. He was president of the Majestic Trust Company, and never forgot that fact.

“To what use would you devote the property of Market Square Church?” he gravely asked.

“The erection of a terminal station for all the municipal transportation in New York,” answered Allison; “subways, elevateds, surface cars, traction lines! The proposition should have the hearty co-operation of every citizen.”

Simple little idea, wasn’t it? Gail had to think successively to comprehend what a stupendous enterprise this was; and the man talked about it as modestly as if he were planning to sod a lawn; more so! Why, back home, if a man dreamed a dream so vast as that, he just talked about it for the rest of his life; and they put a poet’s wreath on his tombstone.

“Now you’re talking sentiment,” retorted stubby-moustached Jim Sargent. “You said, a while ago, that you came here strictly on business. So did we. This is no place for sentiment.”

Rufus Manning, with the tip of his silvery beard in his fingers, looked up into the delicate groining of the apse, where it curved gracefully forward over the head of the famous Henri Dupres crucifix, and he grinned. Gail Sargent was looking contemplatively from one to the other of the grave vestrymen.

“You’re right,” conceded Allison curtly. “Suppose you fellows talk it over by yourselves, and let me know your best offer.”

“Very well,” assented Jim Sargent, with an indifference which did not seem to be assumed. “We have some other matters to discuss, and we may as well thrash this thing out right now. We’ll let you know to-morrow.”

Gail looked at her watch and rose energetically.

“I shall be late at Lucile’s, Uncle Jim. I don’t think I can wait for you.”

“I’m sorry,” regretted Sargent. “I don’t like to have you drive around alone.”

“I’ll be very happy to take Miss Sargent anywhere she’d like to go,” offered Allison, almost instantaneously.

“Much obliged, Allison,” accepted Sargent heartily; “that is, if she’ll go with you.”

“Thank you,” said Gail simply, as she stepped out of the pew.

The gentlemen of the vestry rose as one man. Old Nicholas Van Ploon even attempted to stand gracefully on one leg, while his vest bulged over the back of the pew in front of him.

“I think we’ll have to make you a permanent member of the vestry,” smiled Manning, the patriarch, as he bowed his adieus. “We’ve been needing a brightening influence for some time.”

Willis Cunningham, the thoughtful one, wedged his Vandyke between the heads of Standard Cereal Clark and Banker Chisholm.

“We hope to see you often, Miss Sargent,” was his thoughtful remark.

“I mean to attend services,” returned Gail graciously, looking up into the organ loft, where the organist was making his third attempt at that baffling run in the Bach prelude.

“You haven’t said how you like our famous old church,” suggested the Reverend Smith Boyd with pleasant ease, though he felt relieved that she was going.

The sudden snap in Gail’s eyes fairly scintillated. It was like the shattering of fine glass in the sunlight.

“It seems to be a remarkably lucrative enterprise,” she smiled up at him, and was rewarded by a snort from Uncle Jim and a chuckle from silvery-bearded Rufus Manning. Allison frankly guffawed. The balance of the sedate vestry was struck dumb by the impertinence.

Gail felt the eyes of the Reverend Smith Boyd fixed steadily on her, and turned to meet them. They were cold. She had thought them blue; but now they were green! She stared back into them for a moment, and a little red spot came into the delicate tint of her oval cheeks; then she turned deliberately to the marvellously beautiful big transept window. It had been designed by the most famous stained-glass artist in the world, and its subject lent itself to a wealth of colour. It was Christ turning the money changers out of the temple!

CHAPTER II
“WHY?”

“Snow!” exclaimed Gail in delight, turning up her face to the delicate flakes. “And the sun shining. That means snow to-morrow!”

Allison helped her into his big, piratical looking runabout, and tucked her in as if she were some fragile hot-house plant which might freeze with the first cool draught. He looked, with keen appreciation, at her fresh cheeks and sparkling eyes and softly waving hair. He had never given himself much time for women, but this girl was a distinct individual. It was not her undeniable beauty which he found so attractive. He had met many beautiful women. Nor was it charm of manner, nor the thing called personal magnetism, nor the intelligence which gleamed from her eyes. It was something intangible and baffling which had chained his interest from the moment she had appeared in the vestry doorway, and since he was a man who had never admitted the existence of mysteries, his own perplexity puzzled him.

“The pretty white snow is no friend of mine,” he assured her, as he took the wheel and headed towards the Avenue. He looked calculatingly into the sky. “This particular downfall is likely to cost the Municipal Transportation Company several thousand dollars.”

“I’m curious to know the commercial value of a sunset in New York,” Gail smiled up at him. Her eyes closed for a swift instant, her long, brown lashes curving down on her cheeks, but beneath them was an infinitesimal gleam; and Allison had the impression that under the cover of her exquisitely veined lids she was looking at him corner-wise, and having a great deal of fun all by herself.

“We haven’t capitalised sunsets yet, but we have hopes,” he laughed.

“Then there’s still a commercial opportunity,” she lightly returned. “I feel quite friendly to money, but it’s so intimate here. I’ve heard nothing else since I came, on Monday.”

“Even in church,” he chuckled. “You delivered a reckless shock to the Reverend Smith Boyd’s vestry.”

“Well?” she demanded. “Didn’t he ask my opinion?”

“I don’t think he’ll make the mistake again,” and Allison took the corner into the Avenue at a speed which made Gail, unused to bare inches of leeway, class Allison as a demon driver. The tall traffic policeman around whose upraised arm they had circled smiled a frank tribute to her beauty, and she felt relieved. She had cherished some feeling that they should be arrested.

“However, even a church must discuss money,” went on Allison, as if he had just decided a problem to which he had given weighty thought.

“Fifty millions isn’t mere money,” retorted Gail; “it’s criminal wealth. If no man can make a million dollars honestly, how can a church?”

Allison swerved out into the centre of the Avenue and passed a red limousine before he answered. He had noticed that everybody in the street stared into his car, and it flattered him immensely to have so pretty a girl with him.

“The wealth of Market Square Church is natural and normal,” he explained. “It arises partly from the increase in value of property which was donated when practically worthless. Judicious investment is responsible for the balance.”

“Oh, bother!” and Gail glanced at him impatiently. “Your natural impulse is to defend wealth because it is wealth; but you know that Market Square Church never should have had a surplus to invest. The money should have been spent in charity. Why are they saving it?”

Allison began to feel the same respect for Gail’s mental processes which he would for a man’s, though, when he looked at her with this thought in mind, she was so thoroughly feminine that she puzzled him more than ever.

“Market Square Church has an ambition worthy of its vestry,” he informed her, bringing his runabout to rest, with a swift glide, just an accurate three inches behind the taxi in front of them. “When it has fifty million dollars, it proposes to start building the most magnificent cathedral on American soil.”

Gail watched the up-town traffic piling around them, wedging them in, packing them tightly on all sides, and felt that they must be hours in extricating themselves from this tangle of shining-bodied vehicles. The skies had turned grey by now, and the snow was thicker in the air. The flakes drove, with a cool, refreshing snap, into her face.

“Why?” she pondered. “Will a fifty million dollar cathedral save souls in proportion to the amount of money invested?”

Allison enjoyed that query thoroughly.

“You must ask the Reverend Smith Boyd,” he chuckled. “You talk like a heathen!”

“I am,” she calmly avowed. “I’ve been a heathen ever since a certain respectable old religious body dropped the theory of infant damnation from its creed. Its body of elders decided to save the souls of unbaptised babies from everlasting hell-fire; and the anti-damnation wing won by three grey-whiskered votes.”

Proper ladies in the nearby cars stared with haughty disapproval at Allison, whose degree of appreciation necessitated a howl. Gail, however, did not join in the mirth. That telltale red spot had appeared in the delicate pink of her checks. She was still angry with the man-made creed which had taught a belief so horrible. The traffic blockade was lifted, and Allison’s clutch slammed. The whole mass of vehicles moved forwards, and in two blocks up the Avenue they had scattered like chaff. Allison darted into an opening between two cars, his runabout skidded, and missed a little electric by a hair’s breadth. He had no personal interest in religion, but he had in Gail.

“So you turned infidel.”

“Oh no,” returned Gail gravely, and with a new tone. “I pray every morning and every night, and God hears me.” The note of reverence in her voice was a thing to which Allison gave instant respect. “I have no quarrel with religion, only with theology. I attend church because its spiritual influence has survived in spite of outgrown rites. I take part in the services, though I will not repeat the creed. Why, Mr. Allison, I love the church, and the most notable man in the future history of the world will be the man who saves it from dead dogma.” Her eyes were glowing, the same eyes which had closed in satirical mischief. Now they were rapt. “What a stunning collie!” she suddenly exclaimed.

Allison, who had followed her with admiring attention, his mind accompanying hers in eager leaps, laughed in relief. After all, she was a girl—and what a girl! The exhilaration of the drive, and of the snow beating in her face, and of the animated conversation, had set the clear skin of her face aglow with colour. Her deep red lips, exquisitely curved and half parted, displayed a row of dazzling white teeth, and the elbow which touched his was magnetic. Allison refused to believe that he was forty-five!

“You’re fond of collies,” he guessed, surprised to find himself with an eager interest in the likes and dislikes of a young girl. It was a new experience.

“I adore them!” she enthusiastically declared. “Back home, I have one of every marking but a pure white.”

There was something tender and wistful in the tone of that “back home.” No doubt she had hosts of friends and admirers there, possibly a favoured suitor. It was quite likely. A girl such as Gail Sargent could hardly escape it. If there was a favoured suitor Allison rather pitied him, for Gail was in the city of strong men. Busy with an entirely new and strange group of thoughts, Allison turned into the Park, and Gail uttered an exclamation of delight as the fresh, keen air whipped in her face. The snow was like a filmy white veil against the bare trees, and enough of it had clung, by now, to outline, with silver pointing, the lacework of branches. On the turf, still green from the open winter, it lay in thin white patches, and squirrels, clad in their sleek winter garments, were already scampering to their beds, crossing the busy drive with the adroitness of accomplished metropolitan pedestrians, their bushy tails hopping behind them in ungainly loops.

The pair in the runabout were silent, for the east drive at this hour was thronged with outward bound machines, and the roadway was slippery with the new-fallen snow. Steady of nerve, keen of eye, firm of hand! Gail watched the alert figure of Allison, tensely and yet easily motionless, in the seat beside her. The terrific swiftness of everything impressed her. Every car was going at top speed, and it seemed that she was in a constant maze of hair-breadth escapes. By and by, however, she found another and a greater marvel; that in all this breathless driving, there was no recklessness. Capability, that was the word for which she had been groping. No man could survive here, and rest his feet upon the under layer, unless he possessed superior ability, superior will, superior strength. She arrived at exactly the same phrase Allison had entertained five minutes before; “the city of strong men!” Again she turned to the man at her side for a critical inspection, in this new light. His frame was powerful, and the square, high forehead, with the bulges of concentration above the brows, showed his mental equipment to be equally as rugged. His profile was a crisply cut silhouette against the wintry grey; straight nose, full, firm lips, pointed chin, square jaw. He was a fair example of all this force.

Perhaps feeling the steady gaze, Allison turned to her suddenly, and for a moment the grey eyes and the brown ones looked questioningly into each other, then there leaped from the man to the woman a something which held her gaze a full second longer than she would have wished.

“Air’s great,” he said with a smile.

“Glorious!” she agreed. “I don’t want to go in.”

“Don’t,” he promptly advised her.

“That’s a simple enough solution,” and her laugh, in the snow-laden air, reminded him, in one of those queer flashes of memory, of a little string of sleighbells he had owned as a youngster. “However, I promised Cousin Lucile.”

“We’ll stop at the house long enough to tell her you’re busy,” suggested Allison, as eager as a boy. He had been on his way home to dress for a business banquet, but such affairs came often, and impulsive adventures like this could be about once in a lifetime with him. He had played the grubbing game so assiduously that, while he had advanced, as one of his lieutenants said, from a street car strap to his present mastership of traction facilities, he had missed a lot of things on the way. He was energetic to make up for the loss, however. He felt quite ready to pour a few gallons of gasolene into his runabout and go straight on to Boston, or any other place Gail might suggest; and there was an exhilaration in his voice which was contagious.

“Let’s!” cried Gail, and, with a laugh which he had discarded with his first business promotion, Allison threw out another notch of speed, and whirled from the Seventy-second Street entrance up the Avenue to the proper turning, and halfway down the block, where he made a swift but smooth stop, bringing the step with marvellous accuracy to within an inch of the curb.

“Won’t you come in?” invited Gail.

“We’d stay too long,” grinned Allison, entering into the conspiracy with great fervour.

She flashed at him a smile and ran up the steps. She turned to him again as she waited for the bell to be answered, and nodded to him with frank comradery.

“Time me,” she called, and he jerked out his watch as she slipped in at the door.

Two vivacious looking young women, one tall and black-haired and the other petite and blonde, and both fashionably slender and both pretty, rushed out into the hall and surrounded her.

“We thought you’d never come,” rattled Lucile Teasdale, who was the petite blonde, and the daughter of the sister of the wife of Gail’s Uncle Jim.

“Who’s the man?” demanded Mrs. “Arly” Fosland, with breathless interest.

“Where’s my tea?” answered Gail.

“We saw you dash up,” supplemented Lucile. “We thought it was a fire.”

“Why doesn’t he come in?” this from Arly, in whom two years of polite married life had not destroyed an innocently eager curiosity to inspect eligibles at close range, for her friends.

“Who is he?” insisted Lucile, peeping out of the hall window.

“Edward E. Allison,” primly announced Gail, suppressing a giggle. “I got him at Uncle Jim’s vestry meeting. He’s waiting to take me riding in the Park. Where’s my tea?”

“Edward E. Allison!” gasped “Arly” Fosland. “Why, he’s the richest bachelor in New York, even if he isn’t a social butterfly,” and she contemplated Gail in sisterly wonder and admiration. “Good gracious, child, run!”

“Come for the tea to-morrow!” urged Lucile.

They were all three laughing, and the two young married women were pushing Gail forward. At the door Lucile and Arly separated from her, to peer out of the two side windows.

“He doesn’t look so old,” speculated Arly; and Lucile opened the door.

“Good-bye, dearie,” and Lucile kissed her cousin in plain sight of the curb, upon which there was nothing for that young lady to do but go.

For an instant, Edward E. Allison had a glimpse of her, in her garnet and turquoise, flanked by a sprightly vision in blue and another sprightly vision in pink, and he thought he heard the suppressed sounds of tittering; then the door closed, and the lace curtains of the hall windows bulged outward, and Gail came tripping down the steps.

“Two minutes and forty-eight seconds,” called Allison, putting away his stop watch with one hand and helping her with the other. He tucked her in more quickly than at the church, but with equal care, then he jumped in beside her, and never had he cut so swift and sure a circle with his sixty horse-power runabout.

They raced up and into the Park, and around the winding driveways with the light-hearted exhilaration of children, and if there was in them at that moment any trace of mature thought, they were neither one aware of it. They were glad that they were just living, and moving swiftly in the open air, glad that it was snowing, glad that the light was beginning to fade, that there were other vehicles in the Park, that the world was such a bright and happy place; and they were quite pleased, too, to be together.

It was still light, though the electric lamps were beginning to flare up through the thin snow veil, when they rounded a rocky drive, and came in view of a little lookout house perched on a hill.

“Oh!” called Gail, involuntarily putting her hand on his arm. “I want to go up there!”

The work of Edward E. Allison was well nigh perfection. He stopped the runabout exactly at the centre of the pathway, and was out and on Gail’s side of the car with the agility of a youngster after a robin’s egg. He helped her to alight, and would have helped her up the hill with great pleasure, but she was too nimble and too eager for that, and was in the lookout house several steps ahead of him.

“It’s glorious,” she said, and her low, melodious voice thrilled him again with that strange quality he had noticed when she had first spoken at the vestry meeting.

Below them lay a grey mist, dotted here and there with haloed lights, which receded in the distance into tiny yellow blurs, while the nearer lamps were swathed in swirling snowflakes. Nearby were ghosts of trees projecting their tops from the misty lake, and out of what seemed a vast eerie depth came the clang of street cars, and the rumble of the distant elevated, and the honks of auto horns, and all the rattle and roar of the great city, muffled and subdued.

“It’s like being out of the world.” He was astonished to find in himself the sudden growth of a poetic spirit, and his voice had in it the modulation which went with the sentiment.

“This was created,” mused Gail, as if answering an inner question. “Why should the clumsy minds of men destroy the simplicity of anything so vast, and good, and beautiful, as our instinctive belief in the Creator?”

Finding no answer in his experience to this unfathomable mystery, Edward E. Allison very wisely kept still and admired the scenery, which consisted of one girl framed tastefully in a miscellaneous assortment of snowflakes. When he tried to unravel the girl, he found her a still more fathomless mystery, and gave up the task in a hurry. After all, she was right there, and that was enough.

When she was quite finished with the view, she turned and went down the hill, and Edward Allison nearly sprained his spinal column in getting just ahead of her on the steepened narrow path. It was treacherous walking just there, with the freshly fallen snow on the shale stones. He was heartily glad that he had taken this precaution, for, near the bottom of the hill, one of her tiny French heels slid, and she might have fallen had it not been for the iron-like arm which he threw back to support her. For just an instant she was thrown fairly in his embrace, with his arm about her waist, and her weight upon his breast; and, in that instant, the fire which had been smouldering in him all afternoon burst into flame. With a mighty repression he resisted the impulse to crush her to him, and handed her to the equilibrium which she instinctively sought, though the arm trembled which had been pressed about her. His heart sang, as he helped her into the machine, and sprang in beside her. He felt a savage joy in his strength as he started the car and felt the wheel under his hard grip. He was young, younger than he had ever been in his boyhood; strong, stronger than he had ever been in his youth. What worlds he might conquer now with this new blood racing through his veins. It was as if he had been suddenly thrust into the fires of eternal life, and endowed with all the vast, irresistible force of creation!

Gail, too, was disturbed. While she had laughed to cover the embarrassment of her mishap, she had been quite collected enough to thank Allison for his ready aid; but she had felt the thrill of that tensed arm, and it had awakened in her mind an entirely new vein of puzzled conjecture. They were both silent, and busy with that new world which opens up when any two congenial personalities meet, as they raced out of the Park, and over One Hundred and Tenth Street, and up Riverside Drive, and out Old Broadway. Occasionally they exchanged bits of spineless repartee, and laughed at it, but this was only perfunctory, for they had left the boy and girl back yonder in the park.

Gravity with a man invariably leads him back to the consideration of his leading joy in life, business; and the first thing Allison knew he was indulging in quite a unique weakness, for him; he was bragging! Not exactly flat-footed; but, with tolerably strong insinuation, he gave her to understand that the consolidation of the immense traction interests of New York was about as tremendous an undertaking as she could comprehend, and that, having attained so dizzy a summit, he felt entitled to turn himself to lighter things, to enjoy life and gaiety and frivolity, to rest, as it were, upon his laurels.

Gail was amused, as she always was when men of strong achievement dropped into this weakness to interest girls. She did appreciate and admire his no doubt tremendous accomplishment; it was only his naïvete which amused her, and to save her she could not resist the wicked little impulse to nettle him. To his suggestion that he could now lead a merry life because he was entitled to rest upon his laurels, she had merely answered “Why?”

He dropped into a silence so dense that the thump was almost audible, and she was contrite. She had pricked him deeper than she knew, however. She had not understood how gigantic the man’s ambitions had been, nor how vain he was of his really marvellous progress. After all, why should he pause, when he had such power in him? She did well to speak slightingly of any achievement made by a man of such proved ability. New ambitions sprang up in him. The next time he talked of business with her he would have something startling under way; something to compel her respect. The muscles of his jaws knotted. It was like being dared to climb higher in a swaying tree.

“Oh, it’s dark!” suddenly discovered Gail. “Aunty will be frantic.”

“That’s so,” regretfully agreed Allison, who, having no Aunties of his own, was prone to forget them. “We’ll stop up at this roadhouse, and you can telephone her,” and he turned in at the drive where rose petalled lights gleamed out from the latticed windows of a low-eaved building. Dozens of autos, parked amid the snow-sheeted shrubbery, glared at them with big yellow eyes, and, through the windows, were white cloths and sparkling glassware, and laughing groups about the tables, and hurrying waiters. There was music, too, slow, languorous music!

“Doesn’t it look inviting!” exclaimed Allison, becoming instantly aware of the pangs of hunger.

“It’s an enchanting place!” agreed Gail enthusiastically.

Allison hesitated a moment.

“Tell your aunt we’re dining here,” he suggested.

She laughed aloud.

“Wouldn’t it be fun,” she speculated, and Allison led her in to the phone. She turned to him with a snap in her eyes at the door of the booth. “It depends on who answers.”

CHAPTER III
THE CHANGE IN THE RECTOR’S EYES

The grand privilege of Mrs. Jim Sargent’s happy life was to worry all she liked. She began with the rise of the sun, and worried about the silver chest; whether it had been locked over night. Usually she slipped downstairs, in the grey of the morning, to see, and, thus happily started on the day, she worried about breakfast and luncheon and dinner; and Jim and her sister and her niece, Lucile; and the servants and the horses and the flowers; and at nights she lay awake and heard burglars. Just now, as she sat on the seven chairs and the four benches of the mahogany panelled library, amid a wealth of serious-minded sculpture and painting and rare old prints, she was bathed in a new ecstasy of painful enjoyment. She was worried about Gail! It was six-thirty now, and Gail had not yet returned from Lucile’s.

At irregular intervals, say first two minutes and then three and a half, and then one, she walked into the Louis XIV reception parlour, and made up her mind to have a new jeweller try his hand at the sun-ray clock, and looked out of the windows to see if Lucile’s car was arriving. Between times she pursued her favourite literary diversion; reading the automobile accidents in the evening papers. She had spent all her later years in looking for Jim’s name among the list of the maimed!

Mrs. Helen Davies, dressed for dinner with as much care as if she had been about to attend one of the unattainable Mrs. Waverly-Gaites’ annuals, came sweeping down the marble stairs with the calm aplomb of one whom nothing can disturb, and, lorgnette in hand, turned into the library without even a glance into the floor-length mirror in the hall. Her amber beaded gown was set perfectly on her fine shoulders, and her black hair, fashionably streaked with grey, was properly done, as she was perfectly aware.

“I’m so glad you came down, Helen!” breathed Mrs. Sargent, with a sigh of relief. “I’m so worried!”

“Naturally, Grace,” returned her sister Helen, who was reputed to be gifted in repartee. “One would be, under the circumstances. What are they?” and she tapped her chin delicately with the tip of her lorgnette, as a warning to an insipient yawn. It was no longer good form to be bored.

“Gail!” replied Mrs. Sargent, who was inclined to dumpiness and a decided contrast to her stately widowed sister. “She hasn’t come home from Lucile’s!”

Mrs. Helen Davies sat beneath the statue of Minerva presenting wisdom to the world, and arranged the folds of her gown to the most graceful advantage.

“You shouldn’t expect her on time, coming from Lucile’s,” she observed, with a smile of proper pride. She was immensely fond of her daughter Lucile; but she preferred to live with her sister. “I have a brilliant idea, Grace. I’ll telephone,” and without seeming to exert herself in the least, she glided from her picturesque high-backed flemish chair, and sat at the library table, and drew the phone to her, and secured her daughter’s number.

“Hello, Lucile,” she called, in the most friendly of tones. “You’d better send Gail home, before your Aunt Grace develops wrinkles.”

“Gail isn’t here,” reported Lucile triumphantly. “She dropped in, two hours ago, and dropped right out, without waiting for her tea. You’d never guess with whom she’s driving! Edward E. Allison! He’s the richest bachelor in New York!”

Mrs. Helen Davies turned to her anxious sister with a sparkle in her black eyes.

“It’s all right, Grace,” and then she turned eagerly to the phone. “Did he come in?”

“They were in too big a rush,” jabbered Lucile excitedly. “He doesn’t look old at all. Arly and I watched them drive away. They seemed to be great chums. Gail got him at Uncle Jim’s vestry. Doesn’t she look stunning in red!”

“Where is she?” interrupted Mrs. Sargent, holding her thumb.

“Out driving,” reported sister Helen. “Have you sent your invitations for the house-party, Lucile?” and she discussed that important subject until Mrs. Sargent’s thumb ached.

“With whom is Gail driving, and where?” asked sister Grace, anxious for detail.

Mrs. Helen Davies touched all of her fingertips together in front of her on the library table, and beamed on Grace.

“Don’t worry about Gail,” she smilingly advised. “She is driving with Edward E. Allison. He is the richest bachelor in New York, though not socially prominent. No one has ever been able to interest him. I predict for Gail a brilliant future,” and she moved over contentedly to her favourite contrast with Minerva.

“Gail would attract any one,” returned Mrs. Sargent complacently, and then a little crease came in her brow. “I wonder where she met him.”

“At the vestry meeting, Lucile said.”

“Oh,” and Mrs. Sargent’s brow cleared instantly. “Jim introduced them. I wonder where Jim is!”

“I am glad Gail is not definitely engaged,” mused Mrs. Davies. “I am pleased with her. Young Mr. Clemmens may seem to be a very brilliant match, back home, but, with her exceptional advantages, she has every right to expect to do better.”

Again the creases came in Mrs. Sargent’s brow.

“I don’t know,” she worried. “Gail has had four letters in four days from Mr. Clemmens. Of course, if she genuinely cares for him—”

“But she doesn’t,” Helen comforted herself, figuring it all out carefully. “A young man who would write a letter a day, would exert every possible pressure to secure a promise, before he would let a beautiful creature like Gail come to New York for the winter; and the fact that he did not succeed proves, conclusively, that she has not made up her mind about him.”

The door opened, and Jim Sargent came in, wiping the snow from his stubby moustache before he distributed his customary hearty greetings to the family.

“Where’s Gail?” he wanted to know.

“Out driving with Edward E. Allison,” answered both ladies.

“Still?” inquired Jim Sargent, and then he laughed. “She’s a clever girl. Smart as a whip! She nearly started a riot in the vestry.”

“Was Willis Cunningham there?” inquired Mrs. Davies interestedly.

“Took me in a corner after the meeting and told me that Gail bore a remarkable resemblance to the Fratelli Madonna, and might he call.”

“Mr. Cunningham is one of the men I was anxious for her to meet,” and Mrs. Davies touched her second finger, as if she were checking off a list.

“What did Gail do?” wondered Mrs. Sargent.

Jim, crossing to the door, chuckled, and removed his watch chain from his vest.

“Told Boyd that Market Square Church was a good business proposition.”

The ladies did not share his amusement.

“To the Reverend Boyd!” breathed Mrs. Sargent, shocked. She considered the Reverend Smith Boyd the most wonderful young man of his age.

“How undiplomatic,” worried Mrs. Davies. “I must have a little talk with her about cleverness. It’s dangerous in a girl.”

“Not these days,” declared Jim Sargent, who stood ready to defend Gail, right or wrong, at every angle. “Allison and Manning enjoyed it immensely.”

“Oh,” remarked Helen Davies, somewhat mollified. “And Mr. Cunningham?”

“And what did the Reverend Boyd say?” inquired Mrs. Sargent, much concerned.

“I don’t think he liked it very well,” speculated Gail’s Uncle Jim. “He’s coming over to-night to discuss church matters. I’ll have to dress in a hurry,” and he looked at the watch which he held, with its chain, in his hand.

The telephone bell rang, and Sargent, who could not train himself to wait for a servant to sift the messages, answered it immediately, with his characteristic explosive-first-syllabled:

“Hello!”

“Oh, it’s you, Uncle Jim,” called a buoyant voice. “Mr. Allison and I have found the most enchanting roadhouse in the world, and we’re going to take dinner here. It’s all right, isn’t it?”

“Certainly,” he replied, equally buoyant. “Enjoy yourself, Chubsy,” and he hung up the receiver.

“What is it?” asked Mrs. Davies, in a tone distinctly chill. She had a premonition that Jim Sargent had done something foolish. He seemed so pleased.

“Gail won’t be home,” he announced carelessly, starting for the stairs. “She’s dining with Allison at some roadhouse.”

“Unchaperoned!” gasped Mrs. Davies.

“She’s all right, Helen,” remarked Jim, starting upstairs. “Allison’s a fine fellow.”

“But what will he think of Gail!” protested Helen. “That sort of unconventionality has gone clear out. Jim, you’ll have to get back that number!”

“Sorry,” regretted Jim. “Can’t do it. Against the telephone rules,” and he went on upstairs, positively humming!

The two ladies looked at each other, and sat down in the valley of the shadows of gloom. There was nothing to be done! Mrs. Davies, however, was different from her sister. Grace Sargent was an accomplished worrier, who could remain numb in the exercise of her art, but Helen Davies was a woman of action. She presently called her daughter.

“Have you started your dinner, Lucile?” she demanded.

“No, Ted just came home,” reported Lucile. “What’s the matter?”

“Don’t let him take time to dress,” urged her mother. “You must go right out and chaperon Gail.”

“Where is she?” Lucile delayed to inquire.

“At some roadhouse, dining with Mr. Allison!”

“Well, what do you think of Gail!” exulted Lucile. “Oh, Arly!” and Mrs. Davies heard the receiver drop to the end of its line. She heard laughter, and then the voice of Lucile again. “Mother, she’s with Edward E. Allison, and they’ll do better without a chaperon. Besides, mother dear, there’s a million roadhouses. We’ll come down after dinner. I want to see her when she returns.”

“I don’t suppose she could be found, except by accident,” granted her mother, and gave up the enterprise. “Times are constantly changing,” she complained to her sister. “The management of a girl becomes more difficult every year. So much freedom makes them disregardful of the aid of their elders in making a selection.”

It was not until nine o’clock that the ladies expressed their worry again. At that hour, Ted and Lucile Teasdale and Arly Fosland came in with the exuberance of a New Year’s Eve celebration.

“It’s great sleighing to-night,” stated Lucile’s husband, who was a thin-waisted young man, with a splendid natural gift for dancing.

“All that’s missing is the bells,” chattered the black-haired Arly, breaking straight for her favourite big couch in the library. “The only way to have any speed in an auto is to go sidewise.”

“We’re to get up a skidding match, so I can bet on our chauffeur,” laughed Lucile, fluffing her blonde ringlets before the big mirror in the hall. “We slid a complete circle coming down through the Park, and never lost a revolution!”

“I’ve been thinking it must be bad driving,” fretted Mrs. Sargent. “Gail should be home by now!”

“Allison’s a safe driver,” comforted Ted, who liked to see everybody happy.

Jim Sargent came to the door of the study, in which he was closeted with the Reverend Smith Boyd. Jim was practically the young rector’s business guardian.

“Hello, folks,” he nodded. “Gail home?”

“Not yet,” responded Mrs. Sargent, in whose brow the creases were becoming fixed.

“It’s hardly time,” estimated Jim, and went back in the study.

“Ted has a new divinity,” boasted the wife of that agreeable young man.

“Had, you mean,” corrected Ted. “She’s deserted me for a single man.”

“Is it the Piccadilly widow?” inquired Arly, punching another pillow under her elbow.

“Certainly,” corroborated Ted. “You don’t suppose I have a new one every day.”

“You’re losing your power of fascination then,” retorted Arly. “Lucile’s still in the running with two a day.”

“She should have her kind by the dozen,” responded Ted, complacently stroking his glossy moustache.

“The young set takes up some peculiar fads,” mused Mrs. Davies, with a trace of concern. “I can’t quite accustom myself to the sanction of flirting.”

“Neither can I,” agreed Ted. “It takes the fun out of it.”

“The only joy is in boasting about it at home,” complained Arly Fosland. “I can’t even get Gerald interested in my affairs, so I’ve dropped them.”

“Gerald wouldn’t understand a flirtation of his own,” criticised Ted. “I never saw a man who made such hard work of belonging to twelve clubs. Arly, how did you manage to make him see your fatal lure?”

“Mother did it,” returned Arly, drowsily absorbing the grateful warmth of the room.

“I don’t think anything is half so dangerous to a bachelor as a mother,” stated Lucile, with a friendly smile at Mrs. Davies.

“I’m going to start a new fad,” announced Arly, sitting up and considering the matter; “prudery. There’s nothing more effective.”

“It’s too wicked,” objected Lucile’s mother, and scored another point for herself. It was a wearing task to keep up a reputation for repartee.

“I’m terribly vexed,” confided Lucile, stopping behind Ted’s chair, and idly tickling the back of his neck. “I thought it would be such a brilliant scheme to give a winter week-end party, but Mrs. Acton is going to give one at her country place.”

“Before or after?” demanded Mrs. Davies, with whom this was a point of the utmost importance.

“A week after,” answered Lucile, “but her invitations are out. I wish I hadn’t mailed mine. What can we do to make ours notable?”

That being a matter worth considering, the entire party, with the exception of Aunt Grace, who was listening for the doorbell, set their wits and their tongues to work. Mrs. Helen Davies took a keener interest in it than any of them. The invitation list was the most important of all, for it was a long and arduous way to the heaven of the socially elect, and it took generations to accomplish the journey. The Murdock girls, Grace and herself, had no great-grandfather. Murdock Senior had made his money after Murdock Junior was married, but in time to give the girls a thorough polishing in an exclusive academy. Thus launched, Helen had married a man with a great-great-grandfather, but Grace had married Jim Sargent. Jim was a dear, and had plenty of money, and was as good a railroader as Grace’s father, with whom he had been great chums; but still he was Jim Sargent. Gail’s mother, who had married Jim’s brother, had seven ancestors, but a mother’s family name is so often overlooked. Nevertheless, when Gail came to marry, the maternal ancestry, all other things being favourable, might even secure her an invitation to Mrs. Waverly-Gaites’ annual! Reaching this point in her circle of speculation, Mrs. Helen Davies came back to her starting place, and looked at the library clock with a shock. Ten; and the girl was not yet home!

The Reverend Smith Boyd came out of the study with his most active vestryman, and joined the circle of waiting ones. He was a pleasant addition to the party, for, in spite of belonging to the clergy, he was able to conduct himself, in Rome, in a quite acceptable Roman fashion. Pleasant as he was, they wished he would go home, because it was not convenient to worry in his company; and by this time Lucile herself was beginning to watch the clock with some anxiety. Only Mrs. Sargent felt no restraint. An automobile honked at the door as if it were stopping, and she half arose; then the same honk sounded half way down the block, and she sat down again.

“I’m so worried about Gail!” she stated, holding her thumb.

“We all are,” supplemented Mrs. Davies quickly. “She has been dining with a party of friends, and the streets are so slippery.”

“I should judge Mr. Allison to be a very capable driver,” said the Reverend Smith Boyd; and the ladies glared at Jim. “I envy them their drive on a night like this. I wonder if there will be good coasting.”

“Fine,” judged Jim Sargent, looking out of the window toward the adjoining rectory. “That first snow was wet and it froze. Now there’s a good inch on top of it, and, at this rate, there should be three by morning. A little thaw, and another freeze, and a little more snow to-morrow, and I’ll be tempted to make a bob-sled.”

“I’ll help you,” offered the Reverend Smith Boyd, with a glow of pleasure in his particularly fine eyes. “I used to have a twelve seated bob-sled, which never started down the hill with less than fifteen.”

“I never rode on one,” complained Arly. “I think I’m due for a bob-sled party.”

“You’re invited,” Lucile promptly told her. “Uncle Jim, you and Dr. Boyd will have to hunt up your hammer and saw.”

“I’ll start right to work,” offered the young rector, with the alacrity which had made him a favourite.

“If the snow holds, we’ll go over into the Jersey hills, and slide,” promised Sargent with enthusiasm. “I’ll give the party.”

“I seem to anticipate a pleasant evening,” considered Ted Teasdale, whose athletics were confined entirely to dancing. “We’ll ride down hill on the sleds, and up hill in the machines.”

“That’s barred,” immediately protested Jim. “The boys have to pull the girls up hill. Isn’t that right, Boyd?”

“It was correct form when I was a boy,” returned the rector, with a laugh. He held his muscular hands out before him as if he could still feel the cut of the rope in his palms. He squared his big shoulders, and breathed deeply, in memory of those health-giving days. There was a flush in his cheeks, and his eyes, which were sometimes green, glowed with a decided blue. Arlene Fosland, looking lazily across at him, from the comfortable nest which she had not quitted all evening, decided that it was a shame that he had been cramped into the ministry.

“There’s Gail!” cried Mrs. Sargent, jumping to her feet and running into the hall, before the butler could come in answer to the bell. She opened the door, and was immediately kissed, then Gail came back into the library without stopping to remove her furs. She was followed by Allison, and she carried something inside her coat. Her cheeks were rosy, from the crisp air, and the snow sparkled on her brown hair like tiny diamonds.

“We’ve been buying a dog!” she breathlessly explained, and, opening her coat, she produced an animated teddy bear, with two black eyes and one black pointed nose protruding from a puff ball of pure white. She set it on the floor, where it waddled uncertainly in three directions, and finally curled between the Reverend Smith Boyd’s feet.

“A collie!” and the Reverend Smith Boyd picked up the warm infant for an admiring inspection. “It’s a beautiful puppy.”

“Isn’t it a dear!” exclaimed Gail, taking it away from him, and favouring him with a smile. She whisked the fluffy little ball over to her Aunt Grace, and left it in that lady’s lap, while she threw off her furs.

“Where could you buy a dog at this hour?” inquired Mrs. Davies, glancing at the clock, which stood now at the accusing hour of a quarter of eleven.

“We woke up the kennel man,” laughed Gail, turning, with a sparkling glance, to Allison, who was being introduced ceremoniously to the ladies by Uncle Jim. “We had a perfectly glorious evening! We dined at Roseleaf Inn, entirely surrounded by hectic lights, then we drove five miles into the country and bought Flakes. We came home so fast that Mr. Allison almost had to hold me in.” She turned, laughing, to find the eyes of the Reverend Smith Boyd fixed on her in cold disapproval. They were no longer blue!

CHAPTER IV
TOO MANY MEN

“A conscience must be a nuisance to a rector,” sympathised Gail Sargent, as she walked up the hill beside the Reverend Smith Boyd.

The tall, young rector shifted the thin rope of the sled to his other hand.

“Epigrams are usually more clever than true,” he finally responded, with a twinkle in his eyes. It had been in his mind to sharply defend that charge, but he reflected that it was unwise to assume the speech worth serious consideration. Moreover, he had come to this toboggan party for healthful physical exercise!

“Then you’re guilty of an epigram,” retorted Gail, who was annoyed with the Reverend Smith Boyd without quite knowing why. “You can’t believe all you are compelled, as a minister, to say.”

“That,” returned the Reverend Smith Boyd coldly, “is a matter of interpretation.” He commended himself for his patience, as he proceeded to instruct this mistaken young person. She was a lovable girl, in spite of the many things he found in her of which to disapprove. “The eye of the needle through which the camel was supposed not to be able to pass, was, in reality, a narrow city gate called the Needle’s Eye.”

Gail looked at him with that little smile at the corners of her red lips, eyelids down, curved lashes on her cheeks, and beneath the lashes a sparkle brighter than the moonlight on the snow crystals in the adjoining field.

“It seems to me there was something about wealth in that metaphor,” she observed, her round eyes flashing open as she smiled up at him. “If it was so difficult even in those days for a rich man to enter the Kingdom of Heaven, how can a rich church hope to enter the spirit of the gospel?”

The Reverend Smith Boyd hastily, and almost roughly, drew her aside, as a long, low bob-sled, accompanied by appropriate screams, came streaking down the hill, and passed them. They both turned and followed its progress down the narrowing white road, to where it curved away in a silver line far at the bottom of a hill. Hills and valleys, and fences and trees, and even a distant stream were covered with the fleecy mantle of winter, while high over head in a sky of blue, hung a round, white moon, which flooded the country-side with mellow light, and strewed upon earth’s fresh robe a wealth of countless sparkling gems.

“This is a wonderful sermon,” mused Gail; then she turned to the rector. She softened toward him, as she saw that he, too, had partaken of the awe and majesty of this scene. He stood straight and tall, his splendidly poised head thrown back, and his gaze resting far off where the hills cut against the sky in tree-clad scallops.

“It is an inspiration,” he told her, with a tone in his vibrant voice which she had not heard before; and for that brief instant these two, between whom there had seemed some instinctive antagonism, were nearer in sympathy than either had thought it possible to be. Then the Reverend Smith Boyd happened to remember something. “The morality or immorality of riches depends upon its use,” he sonorously stated, as he stepped out into the road again, dragging his sled behind him, following the noisy, loitering crowd with the number two bob-sled. “Market Square Church, which is the one I suppose you meant in your comparison with the rich man, intends to devote all the means with which a kind Providence has blessed it, to the glory of God.”

“And the gratification of the billionaire vestry,” she added, still annoyed with the Reverend Smith Boyd, though she did not know why.

He turned to her almost savagely.

“Have you no sense of reverence?” he demanded.

“For the church, or the creed, or the ministry? Not a particle!” she heartily assured him. “The church, as an instrument for good, has practically ceased to exist. Even charity, the greatest of the three principles upon which the church was originally founded, has been taken away from it, because the secular organisations dispense charity better and more sanely, and while the object is still alive.”

Again the Reverend Smith Boyd drew her out of the road, almost ungently, and unnecessarily in advance of need, to permit a thick man to glide leisurely by, on his stomach on a hand sled. He grinned up at them from under a stubby moustache, and waved a hand at them with a vigour which nearly ran him into a ditch; but a sharp scrape of his toe in the snow, made with a stab the expertness of which had come back to him through forty years, brought him into the path again, and he slid majestically onward, with happy forgetfulness of the dignity belonging to the president of the Towando Valley Railroad and a vestryman of Market Square Church.

“That used to be lots of fun,” remembered Gail, looking after her Uncle Jim in envy.

“Market Square Church has dispensed millions in charity,” the rector felt it his duty to inform her, as they started up the hill again.

“If it’s like our church at home it costs ninety cents to deliver a dime,” she retorted, bristling anew with bygone aggravations. “So long as you can deliver baskets of provisions in person, it is all right, but the minute you let the money out of your sight it filters through too many paid hands. I found this out just before I resigned from our charity committee.”

He looked at her in perplexity. She was so young and so pretty, so charming in the ermine which framed her pink face, so gentle of speech and movement, that her visible self and her incisive mind seemed to be two different creatures.

“Why are you so bitter against the church?” and his tone was troubled, not so much about what she had said, but about her.

“I didn’t know I was,” she confessed, concerned about it herself. “All at once I seem to look on it as an old shoe which should be cast aside. It is so elaborate to do so little good in the world. Morality is on the increase, as any page of history will show.”

“I believe that to be true,” he hastily assured her, glad to be able to agree with her upon something.

“But it is in spite of the church, not because of it,” she immediately added. “You can’t say that there is a tremendous moral influence in a congregation which numbers eight hundred, and sends less than fifty to services. The balance show their devotion to Christianity by a quarterly check.”

The Reverend Smith Boyd felt unfairly hit.

“That is the sorrow of the church,” he sadly confessed; “the lukewarmness of its followers.”

She felt a trace of compunction for him; but why had he gone into the ministry?

“Can you blame them?” she demanded, as much aggrieved as if she had suffered a personal distress. “Not so long ago, the governing body of the church held a convention in which the uppermost thought was this same lukewarmness. It was felt, and acknowledged, that the church was losing its personal hold on its membership, and that something should be done about it; yet that same body progressed no further in this problem than to realise that something should be done about it; and spent hours and hours wrangling over whether banana wine could be used for the sacrament in Uganda, where grapes do not grow, and where every bottle of grape wine carried over the desert represents the life of a man. Of what value is that to religion? How do you suppose Christ would have decided that question?”

The rector flushed as if he had been struck, and he turned to Gail with that cold look in his green eyes.

“That is too deep a subject to discuss here, but if you will permit me, I will take it up with you at the house,” he quietly returned, and there was a dogged compulsion in his tone.

“I shall be highly interested in the defence,” accepted Gail, with an aggravating smile.

There seemed to be but very little to say after that, and they walked silently up the hill together towards the yellow camp fire, fuming inwardly at each other. Near the top of the hill, her ermine scarf came loose at the throat, and, with her numbed hands, she could not locate the little clasp with which it had been held.

“May I help you?” offered the rector, constraining himself to politeness.

“Thank you.” She was extremely sweet about it, and he reached up to perform the courtesy. The rounded column of her neck was white as marble in the moonlight, and, as he sought the clasps, his fingers, drawn from his woollen gloves, touched her warm throat, and they tingled. He started as if he had received an electric shock, and, as he looked into her eyes, a purple mist seemed to spring between them. He mechanically fastened the clasps, though his fingers trembled. “Thank you,” again said Gail, and he did not notice that her voice was unusually low. She went on over to the group gathered around the fire, but the Reverend Smith Boyd stood where she had left him, staring stupidly at the ground. He was in a whirl of bewilderment, amid which there was some unreasoning resentment, but beneath it all there was an inexplicable sadness.

“Just in time for the Palisade Special, Gail,” called Lucile Teasdale.

“I don’t know,” laughed Gail. “I think of going on a private car this trip,” and she sought among the group for distraction from certain oppressive thought. Allison, and Lucile and Ted and Arly, were among the more familiar figures; besides were a cherub-cheeked young lady in a bear skin, to whom Ted Teasdale was pretending to pay assiduous attention; and the thoughtful Willis Cunningham; and Houston Van Ploon, who was a ruddy-faced young fellow with an English moustache, and a perpetual air of having just come from his tailor’s; and a startling Adonis, with pink cheeks and a shining black goatee and a curly moustache, and large, round, black eyes, which were deep, and full of almost anything one might wish to put into them. This astoundingly fascinating gentleman had been proudly introduced as Dick Rodley, by Arlene, early in the evening, with an air which plainly stated that he was a personal discovery for which she gave herself great credit. At present, however, he was warming the slender white hands of Lucile Teasdale. Now he sprang up and came towards Gail.

“The Palisade Special will not start without Miss Sargent,” he declared, bending upon her an ardent gaze, and bestowing upon her a smile which displayed a flash of perfect white teeth.

Gail breathlessly thought him the most dangerously handsome thing she had ever seen, but she missed the foreign accent in him. That would have made him complete.

“I’m sorry that the Palisade Special will be delayed,” she coolly told him, but she tempered the deliberateness of that decision with an upward and sidelong glance, which she was startled to recognise in herself as distinct coquetry. She concluded, however, on reflection, that this was only a just meed which no one could withhold from this resplendent creature.