An unpleasant thought of Marien Dounay came impertinently into mind, but he repressed it. He had failed with her. A pity! Yes; but his work was too big, too, important, for him to permit it to be interfered with longer by any individual. Besides, there were with him this morning thoughts of a totally different woman, whose life was as fresh and beautiful as the dew-kissed flowers about him. Five years of unswerving devotion on his part had all but wiped from her memory the admission of her lover which had so hurt the trusting heart of Bessie. That confiding trust, the loss of which her pen had so eloquently lamented, had grown again. The very day was set. In four months John Hampstead would hold Bessie Mitchell in his arms, and this time it seemed to him, more surely than it had that day in the little summer house by the tiny painted park in Los Angeles, that he would never, never let her out of them. In the midst of these reflections, a thud sounded on the graveled walk at the minister’s feet. It was the morning paper tightly rolled and whirled from the unerring hand of a boy upon a flying bicycle. The minister waved his hand in response to a similar salute from the grinning urchin, then turned and looked at the roll of ink and paper speculatively. That paper was the world coming to sit down at breakfast with him, and tell him what it had been doing in the past twenty-four hours. It had been doing some desperate things. The wide strip of mourning at the end of the bent cylinder, indicating tall headlines, showed this. The paper had come to him to make confession of the world’s sins. This was right, for he was one of the world’s confessors. But with this thought came another which had occurred to him before. This was that he had won his confessor’s gaberdine too cheaply. He had gained his position as a deputy saviour of mankind at too small a cost. Sometimes he questioned if he were not yet to be made to suffer—excruciatingly—supremely—if, for instance, Bessie were not to be taken from him. Yet he knew, as he reflected somewhat morbidly to this effect, that such a suffering would hardly be efficient. It must be something within himself, something volitional, a cup which he might drink or refuse to drink. The world’s saviour was not Simon of Cyrene, whom they compelled to bear the cross, but the man from the north, who took up his own cross. True, Hampstead had thought on several occasions that he was taking up a cross, but it proved light each time, and turned into a crown either of public or of private approbation. Yet the cross was there, if he had only known it, in the tall black headlines on the paper rolled up and bent tightly and lying like a bomb at his feet.