When they got back to the city that evening there was a note from Bonnie, the first Courtland had received since the formal announcement of her arrival and her gratitude to him for being the means of bringing her to that dear home.

This letter was almost as brief as the first, but it breathed a spirit of peace and content.  She enclosed a check on the funeral account.  Bonnie was well and happy.  She was teaching the grammar-school where Stephen Marshall used to study when he was a little boy, and giving music lessons in the afternoons.  She would soon be able to pay back everything she owed and to do a daughter’s share in the home where she was treated like an own child.  She closed by saying that the kindness he had shown her would never be forgotten; that he had seemed to her, and always would, like the messenger of the Lord sent to help her in her despair.

There was a ring so fresh and strong and true in this little letter, that he could but recognize it.  He sighed and thought how strange it was that he should almost resent it, coming as it did in contrast with Gila’s falseness.  Gila who had professed to love him so deeply, and then had so easily laid that love aside and put on another.  Perhaps all girls were the same.  Perhaps this Bonnie, too, would do the same if a man turned out not to have her ideals.

He answered Bonnie’s note in a day or two with a cordial one, returning her check, assuring her that everything was fully paid, and expressing his pleasure that she had found a real home and congenial work.  Then he dismissed her from his mind.

A week later he went to the seminary, and Pat accompanied him as far as the preparatory school where he was to enter upon his duties as athletic coach.

Courtland found the atmosphere of the seminary quite different from college.  The men were older.  They had chosen definitely their work in the world.  Their talk was of things ecclesiastical.  The happenings of the day were spoken of with reference to the religious world.  It was a new viewpoint in every sense of the word.  And yet he was disappointed that he did not find a more spiritual atmosphere among the young men who were studying for the ministry.  If anywhere in the world the Presence might be expected to be moving and apparent it should be here, he reasoned, where men had definitely given themselves to the study of the Gospel of Christ, and where all were supposed to believe in Him and to have acknowledged Him before the world.  He found himself the only man in the place who was not a member of any church, and yet there were but three or four that he had the feeling he could speak to about the Presence and not be looked upon as “queer.”  There was much worldly talk.  There was a great deal of church gossip about churches and ministers; what this one was paid and what that one got; the chances of a man being called to a city church when he was just out of the seminary.  It was the way his father had talked when he told him he wanted to study theology.  It turned him sick at heart to hear them.  It seemed so far from the attitude a servant of the Lord should have.  He was in a fair way to lose his ideal of ministers as well as of women.  He mentioned it one day bitterly to Pat when he came over to spend a spare evening, as he frequently did.