The winter proved a bleak one, and went with Bayard as was to be expected. The devotee had yet to learn how a woman’s absence may work upon a lover; but of this, since he had no right to do so, he did not complain. Headlong, fathoms down into his work he leaped, and with the diver’s calm he did the diver’s duty. The new chapel progressed after the manner of its kind. Bayard had peremptorily insisted upon the severest economy of plan, demanding a building which should be a “shelter for worship,” he said, and nothing more. Not a waste dollar went into architecture. Not a shingle went into debt. No mortgage desecrated the pulpit of Christlove Church. He built what he could pay for, and nothing more. The dedication of the building was expected to take place in the spring. Meanwhile, his audiences grew upon his hands; and Windover First Church looked darkly at Windover town hall. Orthodoxy, decorum, property, position, gazed at gaping pews, and regretted that “these temperance movements estranged themselves from the churches.” Obscurity, poverty, religious doubt, sin and shame and repentance jammed the aisles to hear “the Christman” interpret decency and dignity and the beauty of holiness. He spoke to these, not with the manner of preachers, but with the lips and heart of a man. Week after week strange, unkempt, unlettered seamen poured in; they stood sluggishly, like forming lava, to listen to him. Certain of his audiences would have honored Whitefield or Robertson. Bayard’s soul seemed that winter alight with a sacred conflagration. He prayed and wrought for Windover as a tongue of flame goes up to the sky--because it was the law of life and fire. It is pathetic to think, now, how it would have comforted the man if he had known how much they loved him--these undemonstrative people of the sea, for whom he gave himself. The half of it was never told him. Censure, and scorn, and scandal, and the fighting of foes in the dark, he knew. The real capacity for affection and loyalty which existed in the rough, warm heart of Windover he sometimes thought he understood. He did not see--as we see now--that he had won this allegiance. This was the more obscure to him because the tension between himself and the liquor interests of Windover was growing quietly into a serious thing, and heavily occupied his attention. And here we know that he was seldom deceived or blinded.