He ceased speaking, but she remained silent, fearing lest she say too little or too much.

“Nance,” he said presently with a slow, whimsical glance, “I’m beginning to suspect that I’m even more of a fool than Hoover thought me—­and he was rather enthusiastic about it, I assure you!”

To which she at length answered musingly: 

“If God makes us fools, doubtless he likes to have us thorough.  Be a great fool, Bernal.  Don’t be a small one.”

CHAPTER XIV

THE INEFFECTIVE MESSAGE

The week had gone while he walked in the crowds, feeling his remoteness; but he knew at last that he was not of the brotherhood of the zealots; that the very sense of humour by which he saw the fallacies of one zealot prevented him from becoming another.  He lacked the zealot’s conviction of his unique importance, yet one must be such a zealot to give a message effectively.  He began to see that the world could not be lost; that whatever might be vital in his own message would, soon or late, be delivered by another.  The time mattered not.  Could he not be as reposeful, as patient, as God?

In spite of which, the impulse to speak his little word would recur; and it came upon him stoutly one day on his way up town.  As the elevated train slowly rounded a curve he looked into the open window of a room where a gloomy huddle of yellow-faced, sunken-cheeked, brown-bearded men bent their heads over busy sewing-machines.  Nearest the window, full before it, was one that touched him—­a young man with some hardy spirit of hope still enduring in his starved face, some stubborn refusal to recognise the odds against him.  And fixed to his machine, where his eyes might now and then raise to it from his work, was a spray of lilac—­his little spirit flaunting itself gaily even from the cross.  The pathos of it was somehow intensified by the grinding of the wheels that carried him by it.

The train creaked its way around the curve—­but the face dreaming happily over the lilac spray in that hopeless room stayed in his mind, coercing him.

As he entered the house, Nancy met him.

“Do go and be host to those men.  It’s our day for the Ministers’ Meeting,” she continued, as he looked puzzled, “and just as they sat down Allan was called out to one of his people who is sick.  Now run like a good boy and ’tend to them.”

So it came that, while the impulse was still strong upon him, he went in among the dozen amiable, feeding gentlemen who were not indisposed to listen to whomsoever might talk—­if he did not bore—­which is how it befell that they had presently cause to remark him.

Not at first, for he mumbled hesitatingly, without authority of manner or point to his words, but the phrase, “the fundamental defect of the Christian religion” caused even the Unitarian to gasp over his glass of mineral water.  His green eyes glittered pleasantly upon Bernal from his dark face with its scraggly beard.