About the great round table were gathered a goodly company—­the company of Brown’s old friends among the rich and eminent of the city.  Not only men of great wealth, but men distinguished in their professions, noted for their achievements, and honoured for their public services, were among those hurriedly asked to do this man honour.  They had all been more or less constant members of his congregation during the years when he was making a name as the most forceful and fearless young preacher who ever ventured to tell the people of aristocratic St. Timothy’s what he thought of them.

And they were gathered to-night to tell him what they thought of him.  They were sparing no pains to do so.  More than once, while he parried their attacks upon his resolution to leave them permanently, parried them with a smiling face, with a resolute quiet voice, with the quickness of return thrust for which he was famous in debate, he was inwardly sending up one oft-repeated, pregnant petition:  “Lord, help me through this—­for Thy sake!”

They were not men alone who combined against him with every pressure of argument; there were women present who used upon him every art of persuasion.  Not that of speech alone, but that subtler witchery of look and smile with which such women well know how to make their soft blows tell more surely than harder ones from other hands.  Among these, all of whom were women of charm and distinction after one fashion or another, was one who alone, though she seemed to be making no direct attack, was waging the heaviest war of all against Donald Brown’s determination.

Atchison, in arranging the places of his guests, had put Helena Forrest at Brown’s right, at the sacrifice of his own pleasure, for by this concession she was farthest from himself.  Whether or not he understood how peculiarly deadly was the weapon he thus used against his friend, he knew that Helena was capable of exerting a powerful influence upon any man—­how should he himself not know it, who was at her feet?  He had no compunction in bringing that influence to bear upon Brown at this moment, when the actual word of withdrawal had not yet been spoken.

Yet as from time to time Atchison looked toward these two of his guests he wondered if Helena were doing all she could in the cause in which he had enlisted her.  She was saying little to Brown, he could see that; and Brown was saying even less to her.  Each seemed more occupied with the neighbour upon the farther side than with the other.  Just what this meant Atchison could not be sure.

The dinner, an affair of surprising magnificence considering the brief hours of its preparation, drew at length to its close.  It seemed to Brown that he had been sitting at that table, in the midst of the old environment in which he had once been carelessly happy and assured, for hours upon end, before the signal came at last for the departure of the women.  And even then he knew that after they had gone the