“You are not going away soon?” he exclaimed.

The words were spoken before he grasped their significance.

“Not at once.  I don’t know how long I shall stay,” she answered hurriedly, intent upon what was in her mind.  “I have thought a great deal about what I said to you that afternoon, and I find it more than ever difficult to excuse myself.  I shan’t attempt to.  I merely mean to ask you to forgive me.”

“There is nothing to forgive,” he assured her, under the influence of the feeling she had aroused.

“It’s nice of you to say so, and to take it as you did—­nicer than I can express.  I am afraid I shall never learn to appreciate that there may be other points of view toward life than my own.  And I should have realized and sympathized with the difficulties of your position, and that you were doing the best under the circumstances.”

“No,” he exclaimed, “don’t say that!  Your other instinct was the truer one, if indeed you have really changed it—­I don’t believe you have.”  He smiled at her again.  “You didn’t hurt my feelings, you did me a service.  I told you so at the time, and I meant it.  And, more than that, I understood.”

“You understood—?”

“You were not criticizing me, you were—­what shall I say?—­merely trying to iron out some of the inconsistencies of life.  Well, you helped me to iron out some of the inconsistencies of my own.  I am profoundly grateful.”

She gazed at him, puzzled.  But he did not, he could not enlighten her.  Some day she would discover what he meant.

“If so, I am glad,” she said, in a low voice.

They were standing in the midst of the crowd that thronged around the pavilion.  An urchin caught hold of the rector’s coat.

“Here he is!  Say, Mr. Hodder, ain’t you going to have any sody?”

“Certainly we are,” he replied, returning Alison’s faint smile . . . .  In the confusion that followed he caught a glimpse of her talking to Mr. Bentley; and later, after he had taken her hand, his eyes followed her figure wending its way in the evening light through the groups toward Park Street, and he saw above the tree-tops the red tiled roof of the great house in which she was living, alone.

CHAPTER XV

THE CRUCIBLE

I

For better or worse John Hodder had flung his treasured beliefs into the crucible, and one by one he watched them crumble and consume away.  None but his own soul knew what it cost him to make the test; and some times, in the early stages of it, he would cast down his book under the lamp and walk for hours in the night.  Curiosity, and the despair of one who is lost impelled him to persist.

It had been said of him that he had a talent for the law, and he now discovered that his mind, once freed, weighed the evidence with a pitiless logic, paid its own tribute—­despite the anguish of the heart —­to the pioneers of truth whose trail it followed into the Unknown, who had held no Mystery more sacred than Truth itself, who had dared to venture into the nothingness between the whirling worlds.