He rose, dressed, breakfasted and discovered there was an eleven o’clock train for Boston.  He discovered also that he hadn’t the slightest wish to take it.  He did not want to go to Boston.  He did not want to go to Crest House.  And very particularly and definitely he did not want to see his daughter Carlotta.  Carlotta might ferret out his errand to Dunbury and be bitterly angry at his interference with her affairs.  Even if she were not angry how could he meet her without telling her everything, including things that were the boy’s right to tell?  It was safer to stay away from Crest House entirely.  That was it.  He would telegraph Carlotta his gout was worse, that he had gone to the country to take a cure.  He would be home Saturday.

Immensely heartened he dispatched the wire.  By this time it was ten-thirty and the dew on the grass was all dry, the morning glories shut tight and the robins vanished.  The church bells were ringing again however and Harrison Cressy decided to go to church, the white Methodist church on the common.  He wouldn’t meet any of the Hill people there.  The Holidays were Episcopal, the Lamberts Unitarian—­a loose, heterodox kind of creed that.  He wished Phil were Methodist.  It would have given him something to go by.  Then he grinned a bit sheepishly at his own expense and shook his head.  He had had the Methodist creed to go by himself and much good had it done him.  Maybe it did not make so much difference what you believed.  It was how you acted that mattered.  Why that was Unitarianism itself, wasn’t it?  Queer.  Maybe there was something in it after all.

Seated in the little church Harrison Cressy hardly listened to the preacher’s droning voice.  He followed his own trend of thought instead, recalling long-forgotten scriptural passages.  “What shall it profit a man though he gain the whole world and lose his own soul?” was one of the recurring phrases.  He applied it to Philip Lambert, applied it sadly to himself and with a shake of his head to his daughter, Carlotta.  He remembered too the story of the rich young man.  Had he made Carlotta as the rich young man, cumbered her with so many worldly possessions and standards that by his own hand he was keeping her out of the heaven of happiness she might have otherwise inherited?  He feared so.

He bowed his head with the others but he did not pray.  He could not.  He was too unhappy.  And yet who knows?  Perhaps his unwonted clarity of vision and humility of soul were acceptable that morning in lieu of prayer to Sandalphou.

As he ate his solitary dinner his despondency grew upon him.  He felt almost positive Philip would fail in his mission, that Carlotta would go her willful way to regret and disillusionment, and all these things gone irretrievably wrong would be at bottom his own fault.

Later he endeavored to distract himself from his dreary thoughts by discoursing with his neighbor on the veranda, a tall, grizzled, soldierly looking gentleman with shrewd but kind eyes and the brow of a scholar.