“How can they help it?” he exclaimed.  “Like you?  They ought to worship you!  They shall!”

She shook her head sadly.

“No one can compel love,” she said.

“Sometimes the love of one can atone for the indifference—­even the hostility of the many,” he ventured.

But she had not stooped to the particular, he perceived.  Her thoughts were ranging wide over an unknown country whither, for the moment, he could not follow.  He studied her abstracted face with its strangely aloof expression, like that of a saint or a fanatic, with a faint renewal of previous misgivings.

“I am very much interested in Fanny Dodge,” she said abruptly.

“In—­Fanny Dodge?” he repeated.

He became instantly angry with himself for the dismayed astonishment he had permitted to escape him, and increasingly so because of the uncontrollable tide of crimson which invaded his face.

She was looking at him, with the calm, direct gaze which had more than once puzzled him.

“You know her very well, don’t you?”

“Why, of course, Miss Dodge is—­she is—­er—­one of our leading young people, and naturally—­ She plays our little organ in church and Sunday School.  Of course you’ve noticed.  She is most useful and—­er—­helpful.”

Lydia appeared to be considering his words with undue gravity.

“But I didn’t come here this morning to talk to you about another woman,” he said, with undeniable hardihood.  “I want to talk to you—­to you—­and what I have to say—­”

Lydia got up from her chair rather suddenly.

“Please excuse me a moment,” she said, quite as if he had not spoken.

He heard her cross the hall swiftly.  In a moment she had returned.

“I found this picture on the floor—­after they had gone,” she said, and handed him the photograph.

He stared at it with unfeigned astonishment.

“Oh, yes,” he murmured.  “Well—?”

“Turn it over,” she urged, somewhat breathlessly.

He obeyed, and bit his lip angrily.

“What of it?” he demanded.  “A quotation from Kipling’s Recessional—­a mere commonplace....  Yes; I wrote it.”

Then his anger suddenly left him.  His mind had leaped to the solution of the matter, and the solution appeared to Wesley Elliot as eminently satisfying; it was even amusing.  What a transparent, womanly little creature she was, to be sure!  He had not been altogether certain of himself as he walked out to the old Bolton place that morning.  But oddly enough, this girlish jealousy of hers, this pretty spite—­he found it piquantly charming.

“I wrote it,” he repeated, his indulgent understanding of her mood lurking in smiling lips and eyes, “on the occasion of a particularly grubby Sunday School picnic:  I assure you I shall not soon forget the spiders which came to an untimely end in my lemonade, nor the inquisitive ants which explored my sandwiches.”