“Ayoub is a poor ignorant creature, hardly more than an animal. Even when he witnessed for Jesus I was not very sure the Word reached him. I refer to—to what Harry Spink said this evening.... It has kept me from sleeping, Willard Bent.” “Yes—I know, sir.” “Harry Spink is a worldly-minded man. But he is not a bad man. He did a manly thing when he left us, since he did not feel the call. But we have felt the call, Willard, you and I—and when a man like Spink puts us a question such as he put this evening we ought to be able to answer it. And we ought not to want to avoid answering it.” “You mean when he said: ‘_What is there in it for Jesus?_’” “The phrase was irreverent, but the meaning reached me. He meant, I take it: ‘What have your long years here profited to Christ?’ You understood it so—?” “Yes. He said to me in the bazaar: ‘What’s your bag?’” Mr. Blandhorn sighed heavily. For a few minutes Willard fancied he had fallen asleep; but he lifted his head and, stretching his hand out, laid it on his disciple’s arm. “The Lord chooses His messengers as it pleaseth Him: I have been awaiting this for a long time.” The young man felt his arm strongly grasped. “Willard, you have been much to me all these years; but that is nothing. All that matters is what you are to Christ ... and the test of that, at this moment, is your willingness to tell me the exact truth, as you see it.” Willard Bent felt as if he were a very tall building, and his heart a lift suddenly dropping down from the roof to the cellar. He stirred nervously, releasing his arm, and cleared his throat; but he made no answer. Mr. Blandhorn went on. “Willard, this is the day of our accounting—of _my_ accounting. What have I done with my twenty-five years in Africa? I might deceive myself as long as my wife lived—I cannot now.” He added, after a pause: “Thank heaven _she_ never doubted....” The younger man, with an inward shiver, remembered some of Mrs. Blandhorn’s confidences. “I suppose that’s what marriage is,” he mused—“just a fog, like everything else.” Aloud he asked: “Then why should _you_ doubt, sir?” “Because my eyes have been opened—” “By Harry Spink?” the disciple sneered. The old man raised his hand. “‘_Out of the mouths of babes_—’ But it is not Harry Spink who first set me thinking. He has merely loosened my tongue. He has been the humble instrument compelling me to exact the truth of you.” Again Bent felt his heart dropping down a long dark shaft. He found no words at the bottom of it, and Mr. Blandhorn continued: “The truth and the whole truth, Willard Bent. We have failed—_I_ have failed. We have not reached the souls of these people. Those who still come to us do so from interested motives—or, even if I do some few of them an injustice, if there is in some a blind yearning for the light, is there one among them whose eyes we have really opened?”