“I can’t if I’m ill,” retorted Joan. “Besides, I am helping him. There are other ways of helping people than by wasting their time talking to them.” Joan thanked him. As he held the door open for her their hands accidentally touched. Joan wished him good-night and went up the stairs. There was no light in her room: only the faint reflection of the street lamp outside.!

“Try and find me brainy,” he whispered to her, as soon as Flossie was out of earshot. “Talk to me about China. I’m quite intelligent on China.” “I’m not indifferent to it,” answered Joan. “I’m reckoning on it to help me.”

There he should have stopped. It would have been a good note on which to finish. But it seemed there was another point he wished to make. Even to the sinner Calvary calls. To Judas—even to him the gates of the life-giving Garden of Gethsemane had not been closed. “With his thirty pieces of silver he could have stolen away. In some distant crowded city of the Roman Empire have lived unknown, forgotten. Life still had its pleasures, its rewards. To him also had been given the choice. The thirty pieces of silver that had meant so much to him! He flings them at the feet of his tempters. They would not take them back. He rushes out and hangs himself. Shame and death. With his own hands he will build his own cross, none to help him. He, too—even Judas, climbs his Calvary. Enters into the fellowship of those who through all ages have trod its stony pathway.” “She wouldn’t mind if she did,” explained Joan. “And you know what she’s like! How can one think what one’s saying with that silly, goggle-eyed face in front of one always.” “I don’t suppose you will agree with me,” he said. “Somehow I felt I had to.”