As the weeks went by, the relapses certainly became fewer.  Something was at work, as real in its effects as the sunlight, but invisible.  Hodder felt it, and watched in suspense while it fought the beasts in this woman, rending her frame in anguish.  The frame might succumb, the breath might leave it to moulder, but the struggle, he knew, would go until the beasts were conquered.  Whence this knowledge?—­for it was knowledge.

On the quieter days of her convalescence she seemed, indeed, more Madonna than Magdalen as she sat against the pillows, her red-gold hair lying in two heavy plaits across her shoulders, her cheeks pale; the inner, consuming fires that smouldered in her eyes died down.  At such times her newly awakened innocence (if it might be called such—­pathetic innocence, in truth!) struck awe into Hodder; her wonder was matched by his own.  Could there be another meaning in life than the pursuit of pleasure, than the weary effort to keep the body alive?

Such was her query, unformulated.  What animated these persons who had struggled over her so desperately, Sally Grower, Mr. Bentley, and Hodder himself?  Thus her opening mind.  For she had a mind.

Mr. Bentley was the chief topic, and little by little he became exalted into a mystery of which she sought the explanation.

“I never knew anybody like him,” she would exclaim.

“Why, I’d seen him on Dalton Street with the children following him, and I saw him again that day of the funeral.  Some of the girls I knew used to laugh at him.  We thought he was queer.  And then, when you brought me to him that morning and he got up and treated me like a lady, I just couldn’t stand it.  I never felt so terrible in my life.  I just wanted to die, right then and there.  Something inside of me kept pressing and pressing, until I thought I would die.  I knew what it was to hate myself, but I never hated myself as I have since then.

“He never says anything about God, and you don’t, but when he comes in here he seems like God to me.  He’s so peaceful,—­he makes me peaceful.  I remember the minister in Madison,—­he was a putty-faced man with indigestion,—­and when he prayed he used to close his eyes and try to look pious, but he never fooled me.  He never made me believe he knew anything about God.  And don’t think for a minute he’d have done what you and Miss Grower and Mr. Bentley did!  He used to cross the street to get out of the way of drunken men—­he wouldn’t have one of them in his church.  And I know of a girl he drove out of town because she had a baby and her sweetheart wouldn’t marry her.  He sent her to hell.  Hell’s here—­isn’t it?”

These sudden remarks of hers surprised and troubled him.  But they had another effect, a constructive effect.  He was astonished, in going over such conversations afterwards, to discover that her questions and his efforts to answer them in other than theological terms were both illuminating and stimulating.  Sayings in the Gospels leaped out in his mind, fired with new meanings; so simple, once perceived, that he was amazed not to have seen them before.  And then he was conscious of a palpitating joy which left in its wake a profound thankfulness.  He made no attempt as yet to correlate these increments, these glimpses of truth into a system, but stored them preciously away.