At their first momentary clash on the day when Hampstead, the book agent, had broken open the church which Burbeck had nailed up, the older man thought he sensed in the younger the presence of a spiritual endowment greater than his own. To this the ruling Elder had bowed within himself. Externally, his manner was not changed, nor his leadership affected. To the congregation his submission to the final judgment of the minister was accounted as a virtue. Instead of weakening him, it strengthened his own standing with the membership. While Burbeck had at times voiced his protests to the pastor at what he felt to be mistaken sentimentalism, and while the protests had been dismissed at times with an unchristian impatience, there was no one to whom the events and disclosures of this terrible week of headlines had been more surprising or more shocking than to the meticulous apostle of the _status quo_. Upon the Elder’s metallic cast of mind each revelation impacted with the shattering effect of a solid shot. Through a thousand crevices thus created, suspicion, rumor, and the stream of truths, half-truths, and lies percolated to the bed of reason. His mind was without elasticity. The school of logic in which he had been trained reasoned coldly, by straight lines to rectangular conclusions. There was no place for allowances or adjustments. Once a stitch was dropped, there was no picking it up, and the blemish was in the garment. So he reasoned now about Hampstead. The minister, having been weak once, must have also been wicked; being brittle, he must have been broken; frail, he must have been fractured. Having been wicked, broken, fractured, this explained his immense sympathy for and capacity to reach other frail, weak, brittle men and women; but it did not justify his pose as a pillar unscathed by fire. Loving All People’s as he loved himself, his wife, his brilliant son,—with pride and self-complacence,—Burbeck felt hot resentment at the disgrace which the disclosures and the flood of scandal brought upon the church.