“I am so hopeful, dearest, for your sake,” his wife said, softly, wishing to reveal her sympathy yet fearful lest she might obtrude it.  He was arranging many sheets of notes before him.

“What will the first one be?” she asked.  He straightened in his chair.

“I’ve made up my mind, Nance!  It’s a wealthy congregation—­one of the wealthiest in the city—­but I shall preach first from the parable of Dives and Lazarus.”

“Isn’t that—­a little—­wouldn’t something else do as well—­something that wouldn’t seem quite so personal?”

He smiled up with fond indulgence.  “That’s the woman of it—­concession for temporal advantage.”  Then more seriously he added, “I wouldn’t be true to myself, Nance, if I went down there in any spirit of truckling to wealth.  Public approval is a most desirable luxury, I grant you—­wealth and ease are desirable luxuries, and the favour of those in power—­but they’re only luxuries.  And I know in this matter but one real necessity:  my own self-approval.  If consciously I preached a polite sermon there, my own soul would accuse me and I should be as a leaf in the wind for power.  No, Nance—­never urge me to be untrue to that divine Christ-self within me!  If I cannot be my best self before God, I am nothing.  I must preach Christ and Him crucified, whether it be to the wealthy of St. Antipas or only to believing poverty.”

Stung with contrition, she was quick to say, “Oh, my dearest, I didn’t mean you to be untrue!  Only it seemed unnecessary to affront them in your very first sermon.”

“I have been divinely guided, Nance.  No considerations of expediency can deflect me now.  This had to be!  I admit that I had my hour of temptation—­but that has gone, and thank God my integrity survives it.”

“Oh, how much bigger you are than I am, dearest!” She looked down at him proudly as she stood close to his side, smoothing the tawny hair.  Then she laid one finger along his lips and made the least little kissing noise with her own lips—­a trick of affection learned in the early days of their love.  After a little she stole from his side, leaving him with head bent in prayerful study—­to be herself alone with her new assurance.

It was moments like this that she had come to long for and to feed her love upon.  Nor need it be concealed that there had not been one such for many months.  The situation had been graver than she was willing to acknowledge to herself.  Not only had she not ceased to wonder since the first days of her marriage, but she had begun to smile in her wonder, fancying from time to time that certain plain answers came to it—­and not at all realising that a certain kind of smile is love’s unforgivable blasphemy; conscious only that the smile left a strange hurt in her heart.

For a little hour she stayed alone with her joy, fondly turning the light of her newly fed faith upon an idol whose clearness of line and purity of tint had become blurred in a dusk of wondering—­an idol that had begun, she now realised with a shudder, to bulk almost grotesquely through that deepening gloom of doubt.