It was immensely vigorous; the men looked at each other with fresh animation.  Responding to the mere physical appeal of it, they picked their steps across the street to the door, and there hesitated, revolted in different ways.  Perhaps, I have forgotten to say that Lindsay came to Calcutta out of an Aberdeenshire manse, and had had a mother before whose name, while she lived, people wrote “The Hon.”  Besides, the singing had stopped, and casual observation from the street was checked by a screen.

“I have wondered sometimes what their methods really are,” said Arnold.

Their methods were just on the other side of the screen.  A bullet-headed youth, in a red coat with gold letters on the shoulders, fingering a cap, slunk out round the end of this impediment, passing the two men beside the door, and a light, clear voice seemed to call after him—­

“Ah! don’t go away!”

Lindsay was visited by a flash of memory and a whimsical speculation whether now, at the week’s end, the soul of Hilda Howe was still pursuing the broad road to perdition.  The desire to enter sprang up in him:  he was reminded of a vista of some interest which had recently revealed itself by an accident, and which he had not explored.  It had almost passed out of his memory; he grasped at it again with something like excitement, and fell adroitly upon the half inclination in Arnold’s voice.

“I suppose I can’t expect you to go in?” he said.

“Precisely why not?” Stephen retorted.  “My dear fellow, we make broad our sympathies, not our phylacteries.”

At any other time Lindsay would have reflected how characteristic was the gentle neatness of that, and might have resented with amusement the pulpit tone of the little epigram.  But this moment found him only aware of the consent in it.  His hand on Arnold’s elbow clinched the agreement; he half pushed the priest into the room, where they dropped into seats.  Stephen’s hand went to his breast instinctively, for the words in the air were holy by association, and stopped there, since even the breadth of his sympathies did not enable him to cross himself before General Booth.  Though absent in body, the room was dominated by General Booth; he loomed so large and cadaverous, so earnest and aquiline and bushy, from a frame on the wall at the end of it.  The texts on the other walls seemed emanations from him; and the man in the short loose, collarless red coat, with “Salvation Army” in crooked black letters on it, who stood talking in high, rapid tones with his hands folded, had the look of a puppet whose strings were pulled by the personality in the frame above him.  It was only by degrees that they observed the other objects in the room—­the big drum on the floor in the empty space where the exhorters stood, the dozen wooden benches and the possible score of people sitting on them, the dull kerosene lamps on the walls, lighting up the curtness of the texts.  There were half a dozen men of