Christian fiction; Clergy -- Fiction; Jesus Christ -- Influence -- Fiction
She had walked silent for a few steps after that. They passed a
street lamp. Her face was pale and beautiful. He had made a movement
to clutch her arm and she had moved a little farther from him.
"No," she had replied. "There was a time I--cannot answer for that
you--should not have spoken to me--now."
He had seen in these words his answer. He was extremely sensitive.
Nothing short of a joyous response to his own love would ever have
satisfied him. He could not think of pleading with her.
"Some time--when I am more worthy?" he had asked in a low voice, but
she did not seem to hear, and they had parted at her home, and he
recalled vividly the fact that no good-night had been said.
Now as he went over the brief but significant scene he lashed
himself for his foolish precipitancy. He had not reckoned on
Rachel's tense, passionate absorption of all her feeling in the
scenes at the tent which were so new in her mind. But he did not
know her well enough even yet to understand the meaning of her
refusal. When the clock in the First Church struck one he was still
sitting at his desk staring at the last page of manuscript of his
unfinished novel.
Rachel went up to her room and faced her evening's experience with
conflicting emotions. Had she ever loved Jasper Chase? Yes. No. One
moment she felt that her life's happiness was at stake over the
result of her action. Another, she had a strange feeling of relief
that she had spoken as she had. There was one great, overmastering
feeling in her. The response of the wretched creatures in the tent
to her singing, the swift, powerful, awesome presence of the Holy
Spirit had affected her as never in all her life before. The moment
Jasper had spoken her name and she realized that he was telling her
of his love she had felt a sudden revulsion for him, as if he should
have respected the supernatural events they had just witnessed. She
felt as if it was not the time to be absorbed in anything less than
the divine glory of those conversions. The thought that all the time
she was singing, with the one passion of her soul to touch the
conscience of that tent full of sin, Jasper Chase had been unmoved
by it except to love her for herself, gave her a shock as of
irreverence on her part as well as on his. She could not tell why
she felt as she did, only she knew that if he had not told her
tonight she would still have felt the same toward him as she always
had. What was that feeling? What had he been to her? Had she made a
mistake? She went to her book case and took out the novel which
Jasper had given her. Her face deepened in color as she turned to
certain passages which she had read often and which she knew Jasper
had written for her. She read them again. Somehow they failed to
touch her strongly. She closed the book and let it lie on the table.
She gradually felt that her thought was busy with the sights she had
witnessed in the tent. Those faces, men and women, touched for the
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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