“I’m sorry,” she continued; “awfully sorry, old girl. It’s a bit of rotten bad luck for both of you. You were just made for one another. And Fate, knowing what was coming, bustles round and gets hold of poor, silly Mrs. Phillips so as to be able to say ‘Yah.’” “I wanted to be a coward,” he said, “to keep out of the fight. I thought of the shame, of the petty persecutions—that even you might despise me. But I couldn’t. I was always seeing His face before me with His beautiful tender eyes, and the blood drops on His brow. It is He alone can save the world. It is perishing for want of love; and by a little suffering I might be able to help Him. And then one night—I suppose it was a piece of driftwood—there rose up out of the sea a little cross that seemed to call to me to stretch out my hand and grasp it, and gird it to my side.”!

He followed it up with another. This one with a chorus, consisting chiefly of “Umpty Umpty Umpty Umpty Ay,” which was vociferously encored. “You didn’t know him, dear,” she had said to Joan. “All his faults were on the outside.”

There was a little humorous smile about his mouth. But his eyes were serious and pleading. “You can ask that,” he said: “you, a soldier? Does the soldier say: ‘I am of no use. I am but a poor man of no account. Who has need of such as I?’ God has need of all. There is none that shall not help to win the victory. It is with his life the soldier serves. Who were they whose teaching moved the world more than it has ever yet been moved by the teaching of the wisest? They were men of little knowledge, of but little learning, poor and lowly. It was with their lives they taught.” Those drawing-rooms? Might not something of the sort be possible? Not, perhaps, the sumptuous salon of her imagination, thronged with the fair and famous, suitably attired. Something, perhaps, more homely, more immediately attainable. Some of the women dressed, perhaps, a little dowdily; not all of them young and beautiful. The men wise, perhaps, rather than persistently witty; a few of them prosy, maybe a trifle ponderous; but solid and influential. Mrs. Denton’s great empty house in Gower Street? A central situation and near to the tube. Lords and ladies had once ruffled there; trod a measure on its spacious floors; filled its echoing stone hall with their greetings and their partings. The gaping sconces, where their link-boys had extinguished their torches, still capped its grim iron railings.