You see, there was an appeal to the imagination--the most audacious
appeal that the world has ever known--and the crowd will be with this
clergyman who uses it to refute the arguments of a man who worked hard
through forty years of ill-health to get at the mere dry common-sense of
things. If Jesus had descended to logic, he'd never have made a convert.
But he appealed magnificently to the imagination, and see the result!"

His mind had been dwelling on Allan's trouble, but now he came back to
his gracious adviser.

"You do me good, Aunt Bell--you've taken all that message nonsense out
of me. I suppose I _could_ be one of them, you know--one of those
fellows that get into trouble--if I saw it was needed; but it isn't. Let
the men who can't help it do it--they have no choice. Hereafter I shall
worry as little about the world's salvation as I do about my own."

When they had finished dinner he let it be known that he was not a
little anxious concerning a message that was late in arriving, and he
made it a point, indeed, that the maid should advise Mrs. Linford to
this effect, with an inquiry whether she might not have seen the delayed
missive.

Then, after a word with Allan, he went to his room and from his south
window smoked into the night--smoked into something approaching quietude
a mind that had been rebelliously running back to the bare-armed girl in
dusky white--the wondering, waiting girl whose hand had trembled into
his so long ago--so many years during which he had been a dreaming fool,
forgetting the world to worship certain impalpable gods of
idealism--forgetting a world in which it was the divinely sensible
custom to eat one's candy cane instead of preserving it superstitiously