Mrs. Phillips was running a Convalescent Home in Folkestone, he told her; and had even made a speech. Hilda was doing relief work among the ruined villages of France. Joan grew angry. “If you choose to suspect evil, of course you can,” she answered with hauteur. “But you might have known me better. I admire the man and sympathize with him. All the things I dream of are the things he is working for. I can do more good by helping and inspiring him”—she wished she had not let slip that word “inspire.” She knew that Flossie would fasten upon it—“than I can ever accomplish by myself. And I mean to do it.” She really did feel defiant, now.!

Flossie interrupted. “How about being quite frank?” she suggested. “Suppose we do love one another. How about putting it that way?” “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.”

“How does one know when one is serving God?” she asked after a pause, apparently rather of herself than of Joan. “It seems so difficult.” She whispered them at last. Not bravely, at all. Feebly, haltingly, with a little sob: her forehead pressed against the cold iron seat, as if that could help her. He turned and leant over his desk. “I guess they’ll have to find another leader if they’re in a hurry,” he added. “I don’t seem able to think about turnips and cows.”