Now as he went over the brief but significant scene he lashed himself for his foolish precipitancy.  He had not reckoned on Rachel’s tense, passionate absorption of all her feeling in the scenes at the tent which were so new in her mind.  But he did not know her well enough even yet to understand the meaning of her refusal.  When the clock in the First Church struck one he was still sitting at his desk staring at the last page of manuscript of his unfinished novel.

Rachel went up to her room and faced her evening’s experience with conflicting emotions.  Had she ever loved Jasper Chase?  Yes.  No.  One moment she felt that her life’s happiness was at stake over the result of her action.  Another, she had a strange feeling of relief that she had spoken as she had.  There was one great, overmastering feeling in her.  The response of the wretched creatures in the tent to her singing, the swift, powerful, awesome presence of the Holy Spirit had affected her as never in all her life before.  The moment Jasper had spoken her name and she realized that he was telling her of his love she had felt a sudden revulsion for him, as if he should have respected the supernatural events they had just witnessed.  She felt as if it was not the time to be absorbed in anything less than the divine glory of those conversions.  The thought that all the time she was singing, with the one passion of her soul to touch the conscience of that tent full of sin, Jasper Chase had been unmoved by it except to love her for herself, gave her a shock as of irreverence on her part as well as on his.  She could not tell why she felt as she did, only she knew that if he had not told her tonight she would still have felt the same toward him as she always had.  What was that feeling?  What had he been to her?  Had she made a mistake?  She went to her book case and took out the novel which Jasper had given her.  Her face deepened in color as she turned to certain passages which she had read often and which she knew Jasper had written for her.  She read them again.  Somehow they failed to touch her strongly.  She closed the book and let it lie on the table.  She gradually felt that her thought was busy with the sights she had witnessed in the tent.  Those faces, men and women, touched for the first time with the Spirit’s glory—­what a wonderful thing life was after all!  The complete regeneration revealed in the sight of drunken, vile, debauched humanity kneeling down to give itself to a life of purity and Christlikeness—­oh, it was surely a witness to the superhuman in the world!  And the face of Rollin Page by the side of that miserable wreck out of the gutter!  She could recall as if she now saw it, Virginia crying with her arms about her brother just before she left the tent, and Mr. Gray kneeling close by, and the girl Virginia had taken into her heart while she whispered something to her before she went out.  All these pictures drawn by the Holy Spirit in the human tragedies brought to a climax there in the most abandoned spot in all Raymond, stood out in Rachel’s memory now, a memory so recent that her room seemed for the time being to contain all the actors and their movements.