“Yes,” he said. “I’ll sound him about giving up his lodgings.” The firelight showed to Joan a comically frightened face, with round, staring eyes and an open mouth.!

Joan laughed. “You don’t somehow suggest the rat,” she said: “rather another sort of beast.” “It wasn’t so incongruous at the time,” he answered. “My father had sent me out to America to superintend a contract. It was the first time I had ever been away from home, though I was nearly thirty; and all my pent-up youth rushed out of me at once. It was a harum-scarum fellow, mad with the joy of life, that made love to her; not the man who went out, nor the man who came back. It was at San Francisco that I met her. She was touring the Western States; and I let everything go to the wind and followed her. It seemed to me that Heaven had opened up to me. I fought a duel in Colorado with a man who had insulted her. The law didn’t run there in those days; and three of his hired gunmen, as they called them, held us up that night in the train and gave her the alternative of going back with them and kissing him or seeing me dead at her feet. I didn’t give her time to answer, nor for them to finish. It seemed a fine death anyhow, that. And I’d have faced Hell itself for the chance of fighting for her. Though she told me afterwards that if I’d died she’d have gone back with them, and killed him.”

“To the poor?” the old man almost shrieked. “To the poor that he has robbed of all power of resistance to oppression by his vile, submissive creed! that he has drugged into passive acceptance of every evil done to them by his false promises that their sufferings here shall win for them some wonderful reward when they are dead. What has been his teaching to the poor? Bow your backs to the lash, kiss the rod that scars your flesh. Be ye humble, oh, my people. Be ye poor in spirit. Let Wrong rule triumphant through the world. Raise no hand against it, lest ye suffer my eternal punishments. Learn from me to be meek and lowly. Learn to be good slaves and give no trouble to your taskmasters. Let them turn the world into a hell for you. The grave—the grave shall be your gate to happiness. “I take myself as typical,” she continued. “When I was twenty I could have loved you. You were the type of man I did love.” Joan answered with a faint smile. “Oh, yes,” she said. “I didn’t forget that argument in case it hadn’t occurred to the Lord.”