Joan could not say. So much depended upon the general state of health. There was the case of her own father. Of course she would always be subject to attacks. But this one would have warned her to be careful. Mr. Simson shook his head. “Somebody’s got to tackle them,” he said. “Tell them the truth about themselves, to their faces.”!

“I shall be going away soon, for a little while,” she said. The talk had helped her to decision. “When I come back I will come and see you all. And you must all come and see me, now and then. I expect I shall have a flat of my own. My father may be coming to live with me. Good-bye. Do all you can to help him.” “A strange supper-party,” he said. “Cyril the Apostate; and Julius who strove against the High Priests and the Pharisees; and Inez a dancer before the people; and Joanna a daughter of the rulers, gathered together in the house of one Mary a servant of the Lord.”

The blood was flowing back into her veins. “Oh, it wasn’t your fault,” she answered. “We must make the best we can of it.” “It was more than love,” he answered. “It was idolatry. God punished me for it. He was a hard God, my God.” “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.”