only, trip abroad.  I was thrown with him—­we sat next each other at table, and our cabins faced—­and something in the man attracted me, a quality such as you speak of in this other, of pure and uncommon goodness.  He was much the same sort as your old man, I fancy, not particularly winning, rather narrow, rather limited in brains and in advantages, with a natural distrust of progress and breadth.  We talked together often, and one day, I saw, by accident, into the depths of his soul, and knew what he had sacrificed to become a clergyman—­it was what meant to him happiness and advancement in life.  It had been a desperate effort, that was plain, but it was plain, too, that from the moment he saw what he thought was the right, there had been no hesitation in his mind.  And I, with all my wider mental training, my greater breadth—­as I looked at it—­was going, with my eyes open, to do a wrong because I wished to do it.  You and I must be built something alike, Ted, for a touch in the right spot seems to penetrate to the core of us—­the one and the other.  This man’s simple and intense flame of right living, right doing, all unconsciously to himself, burned into me, and all that I had planned to do seemed scorched in that fire—­turned to ashes and bitterness.  Of course it was not so simple as it sounds.  I went through a great deal.  But the steady influence for good was beside me through that long passage—­we were two weeks—­the stronger because it was unconscious, the stronger, I think, too, that it rested on no intellectual basis, but was wholly and purely spiritual—­as the confidence of a child might hold a man to his duty where the arguments of a sophist would have no effect.  As I say, I went through a great deal.  My mind was a battle-field for the powers of good and evil during those two weeks, but the man who was leading the forces of the right never knew it.  The outcome was that as soon as I landed I took my passage back on the next boat, which sailed at once.  Within a year, within a month almost, I knew that the decision I made then was a turning-point, that to have done otherwise would have meant ruin in more than one way.  I tremble now to think how close I was to shipwreck.  All that I am, all that I have, I owe more or less directly to that man’s unknown influence.  The measure of a life is its service.  Much opportunity for that, much power has been in my hands, and I have tried to hold it humbly and reverently, remembering that time.  I have thought of myself many times us merely the instrument, fitted to its special use, of that consecrated soul.”

The voice stopped, and the boy, his wide, shining eyes fixed on his father’s face, drew a long breath.  In a moment he spoke, and the father knew, as well as if he had said it, how little of his feeling he could put into words.

“It makes you shiver, doesn’t it,” he said, “to think what effect you may be having on people, and never know it?  Both you and I, father—­our lives changed, saved—­by the influence of two strangers, who hadn’t the least idea what they were doing.  It frightens you.”