She returned his gaze.  And gradually, under her clear olive skin, he saw the crimson colour mounting higher . . . .  She put forth her hand, simply, naturally, and pressed his own, as though they had been friends for a lifetime . . . .

CHAPTER X

THE MESSENGER IN THE CHURCH

I

The annual scourge of summer had descended pitilessly upon the city once more, enervating, depressing, stagnating, and people moved languidly in the penetrating heat that steamed from the pores of the surrounding river bottoms.

The rector of St. John’s realized that a crisis had come in his life, —­a crisis he had tried to stave off in vain.  And yet there was a period during which he pursued his shrunken duties as though nothing had happened to him; as a man who has been struck in battle keeps on, loath to examine, to acknowledge the gravity of his wound; fearing to, perhaps.  Sometimes, as his mind went back to the merciless conflict of his past, his experience at the law school, it was the unchaining of that other man he dreaded, the man he believed himself to have finally subdued.  But night and day he was haunted by the sorrowful and reproachful face of Truth.

Had he the courage, now, to submit the beliefs which had sustained him all these years to Truth’s inexorable inspection?  Did he dare to turn and open those books which she had inspired,—­the new philosophies, the historical criticisms which he had neglected and condemned, which he had flattered himself he could do without,—­and read of the fruit of Knowledge?  Twice, thrice he had hesitated on the steps of the big library, and turned away with a wildly beating heart.

Day by day the storm increased, until from a cloud on the horizon it grew into a soul-shaking tempest.  Profoundly moved Parr’s he had been on that Sunday afternoon, in Eldon Parr’s garden, he had resolutely resolved to thrust the woman and the incident from his mind, to defer the consideration of the questions she had raised—­grave though they were—­to a calmer period.  For now he was unable to separate her, to eliminate the emotion—­he was forced to acknowledge—­the thought of her aroused, from the problems themselves.  Who was she?  At moments he seemed to see her shining, accusing, as Truth herself, and again as a Circe who had drawn him by subtle arts from his wanderings, luring him to his death; or, at other times, as the mutinous daughter of revolt.  But when he felt, in memory, the warm touch of her hand, the old wildness of his nature responded, he ceased to speculate or care, and he longed only to crush and subdue her by the brute power of the man in him.  For good or bad, she had woven her spell.

Here was the old, elemental, twofold contest, carnal and spiritual, thoroughly revived! . . .