“Perhaps you will.”  She was smiling, but her hand shook.

She felt shy, almost tongue-tied.  She made him his tea, and gave him a cup; then she spoke of commonplaces, and the little kettle boiled and bubbled and sang as if there were no sorrow or sadness in the whole wide world.

She came at last timidly to the thing she had to say.

“I don’t quite know how to begin about your letter.  You see when I read it, it wasn’t easy for me at first to think straight.  I hadn’t thought of you as having any such background to your life.  Somehow the outlines I had filled in were—­different.  I am not quite sure what I had thought—­only it had been nothing like—­this.”

“I know.  You could not have been expected to imagine such a past.”

“Oh, it is not your past which weighs so heavily—­on my heart; it is your future.”

Her eyes were full of tears.  She had not meant to say it just that way.  But it had come—­her voice breaking on the last words.

He did not speak at once, and then he said:  “I have no right to trouble you with my future.”

“But I want to be troubled.”

“I shall not let you.  I shall not ask that of your friendship.  Last night when I came back to my rooms I found a rose blooming upon the pages of a book.  It seemed to tell me that I had not lost your friendship; and you have given me this hour.  This is all I have a right to ask of your generosity.”

She moved the jar of lilies aside, so that there might be nothing between them.  “If I am your friend, I must help you,” she said, “or what would my friendship be worth?”

“There is no help,” he said, hurriedly, “not in the sense that I think you mean it.  My past has made my future.  I cannot throw myself into the fight again.  I know that I have been called all sorts of a coward for not facing life.  But I could face armies, if it were anything tangible.  I could do battle with a sword or a gun or my fists, if there were a visible adversary.  But whispers—­you can’t kill them; and at last they—­kill you.”

“I don’t want you to fight,” she said, and now behind the whiteness of her skin there was a radiance.  “I don’t want you to fight.  I want you to deliver your message.”

“What message?”

“The message that every man who stands in the pulpit must have for the world, else he has no right to stand there.”

“You think then that I had no message?”

“I think,” and now her hand went out to him across the table, as if she would soften the words, “I think that if you had felt yourself called to do that one thing, that nothing would have swayed you from it—­there are people not in the churches, who never go to church, who want what you have to give—­there are the highways and hedges.  Oh, surely, not all of the people worth preaching to are the ones in the pews.”

She flung the challenge at him directly.