Just across the hall Dr. Van Anden sat before his table, one hand partly shading his eyes from the gaslight while he read.  And the words which he read were these:  “O let not the oppressed returned ashamed:  let the poor and needy praise thy name.  Arise, O God, plead thine own cause:  remember how the foolish man reproacheth thee daily.  Forget not the voice of thine enemies; the tumult of those that rise up against thee increaseth continually.”

Something troubled the Doctor to-night; his usually grave face was tinged with sadness.  Presently he arose and paced with slow measured tread up and down the room.

“I ought to have done it,” he said at last.  “I ought to have told her mother that he was in many ways an unsafe companion for Sadie, especially in this matter; he is a very cautious, guarded, fascinating skeptic—­all the more fascinating because he will be careful not to shock her taste with any boldly-spoken errors.  I should have warned them—­how came I to shrink so miserably from my duty?  What mattered it that they would be likely to ascribe a wrong motive to my caution?  It was none the less my duty on that account.”  And the sad look deepened on his face as he marched slowly back and forth; but he was nearer a solution of his difficulties than was either of those others for at last he came over to his chair again, and sank before it on his knees.

Now, let us understand these three people each of them, in their separate ways, were making mistakes.  Sadie had said that she was not going to believe any of the nonsense which Dr. Douglass talked; she honestly supposed that she was not influenced in the least.  And yet she was mistaken; the poison had entered her soul.  As the days passed on, she found herself more frequently caviling over the shortcomings of professing Christians; more quick to detect their mistakes and failures; more willing to admit the half-uttered thought that this entire matter might be a smooth-sounding fable.  Sadie was the child of many prayers, and her father’s much-used Bible lay on her dressing-table, speaking for him, now that his tongue was silent in the grave; so she did not quite yield to the enemy—­but she was walking in the way of temptation—­and the Christian tongues around her, which the grave had not silenced, yet remained as mute as though their lips were already sealed; and so the path in which Sadie walked grew daily broader and more dangerous.

Then there was Dr. Douglass—­not by any means the worst man that the world can produce.  He was, or fancied himself to be, a skeptic.  Like many a young man, wise in his own conceit, he had no very distinct idea of what he was skeptical about, nor to what hights of illogical nonsense his own supposed views, carried out, would lead him; like many another, too, he had studied rhetoric, and logic, and mathematics, and medicine, thoroughly and well; he would have hesitated long, and studied hard, and pondered deeply, before