She was walking briskly away toward the gate now, where the shadowy Michael still patiently stood.  Theron strode off in the opposite direction, taking long, deliberate steps, and bowing his head in thought.  He had his hands behind his back, as was his wont, and the sense of their recent contact with her firm, ungloved hands was, curiously enough, the thing which pushed itself uppermost in his mind.  There had been a frank, almost manly vigor in her grasp; he said to himself that of course that came from her playing so much on the keyboard; the exercise naturally would give her large, robust hands.

Suddenly he remembered about the piano; he had quite forgotten to solicit her aid in selecting it.  He turned, upon the impulse, to go back.  She had not entered the gate as yet, but stood, shiningly visible under the street lamp, on the sidewalk, and she was looking in his direction.  He turned again like a shot, and started homeward.

The front door of the parsonage was unlocked, and he made his way on tiptoe through the unlighted hall to the living-room.  The stuffy air here was almost suffocating with the evil smell of a kerosene lamp turned down too low.  Alice sat asleep in her old farmhouse rocking-chair, with an inelegant darning-basket on the table by her side.  The whole effect of the room was as bare and squalid to Theron’s newly informed eye as the atmosphere was offensive to his nostrils.  He coughed sharply, and his wife sat up and looked at the clock.  It was after eleven.

“Where on earth have you been?” she asked, with a yawn, turning up the wick of her sewing-lamp again.

“You ought never to turn down a light like that,” said Theron, with a complaining note in his voice.  “It smells up the whole place.  I never dreamed of your sitting up for me like this.  You ought to have gone to bed.”

“But how could I guess that you were going to be so late?,” she retorted.  “And you haven’t told me where you were.  Is this book of yours going to keep you up like this right along?”

The episode of the book was buried in the young minister’s mind beneath such a mass of subsequent experiences that it required an effort for him to grasp what she was talking about.  It seemed as if months had elapsed since he was in earnest about that book; and yet he had left the house full of it only a few hours before.  He shook his wits together, and made answer—­

“Oh, bless you, no!  Only there arose a very curious question.  You have no idea, literally no conception, of the interesting and important problems which are raised by the mere fact of Abraham leaving the city of Ur.  It’s amazing, I assure you.  I hadn’t realized it myself.”

“Well,” remarked Alice, rising—­and with good-humor and petulance struggling sleepily ill her tone—­“all I’ve got to say is, that if Abraham hasn’t anything better to do than to keep young ministers of the gospel out, goodness knows where, till all hours of the night, I wish to gracious he’d stayed in the city of Ur right straight along.”