the tower.  It was his own inefficiency.  The church was going steadily down, and he was powerless to lift it.  His old enthusiasm, devotion, confidence—­what had become of them?  They seemed to have slipped by slow degrees, through the unsuccessful years, out of his soul, and in their place was a dull distrust of himself; almost—­God forgive him—­distrust in God’s kindness.  He had worked with his might all the years of his life, and what he had to show for it was a poor, lukewarm parish, a diminished congregation, debt—­to put it in one dreadful word, failure!

[Illustration:  He stared into the smoldering fire.]

By the pitiless searchlight of hopelessness, he saw himself for the first time as he was—­surely devoted and sincere, but narrow, limited, a man lacking outward expression of inward and spiritual grace.  He had never had the gift to win hearts.  That had not troubled him much, earlier, but lately he had longed for a little appreciation, a little human love, some sign that he had not worked always in vain.  He remembered the few times that people had stopped after service to praise his sermons, and to-night he remembered not so much the glow at his heart that the kind words had brought, as the fact that those times had been very few.  He did not preach good sermons; he faced that now, unflinchingly.  He was not broad minded; new thoughts were unattractive, hard for him to assimilate; he had championed always theories that were going out of fashion, and the half-consciousness of it put him ever on the defensive; when most he wished to be gentle, there was something in his manner which antagonized.  As he looked back over his colorless, conscientious past, it seemed to him that his life was a failure.  The souls he had reached, the work he had done with such infinite effort—­it might all have been done better and easily by another man.  He would not begrudge his strength and his years burned freely in the sacred fire, if he might know that the flame had shone even faintly in dark places, that the heat had warmed but a little the hearts of men.  But—­he smiled grimly at the logs in front of him, in the small, cheap, black marble fireplace—­his influence was much like that, he thought, cold, dull, ugly with uncertain smoke.  He, who was not worthy, had dared to consecrate himself to a high service, and it was his reasonable punishment that his life had been useless.

Like a stab came back the thought of the junior warden, of the two more empty pews, and then the thought, in irresistible self-pity, of how hard he had tried, how well he had meant, how much he had given up, and he felt his eyes filling with a man’s painful, bitter tears.  There had been so little beauty, reward, in his whole past.  Once, thirty years before, he had gone abroad for six weeks, and he remembered the trip with a thrill of wonder that anything so lovely could have come into his sombre life—­the voyage, the bit of travel, the new countries, the old