“I never knew—anything about it. Great heavens! can I read a man’s heart, and say whom he loves?” “Only your own,” said Ernest Clare, half smiling, yet meeting the doctor’s eyes with all the full, sweet, solemn power of his own. The eyes fell, their owner hesitated how to reply. It was impossible to consider the clergyman a presuming meddler; he had pried into no man’s individual consciousness; nay, had even quietly stated his conviction that the sacred penetralia could be entered only by the man himself. Consciousness. Did not the word itself—knowing _with_—imply another Presence within that Holy of holies? Dr. Richards, as I have said before, was not a practised etymologist. But had his emphatic denial of all power to read another man’s heart been entirely sincere? Had not a sudden glory in a pair of liquid brown eyes beside him answered for one at least who loved both God and his neighbor? This thought, it is certain, came to the father’s heart, and, because it came, he could not reply lightly or scoffingly to that sudden _argumentum ad hominem_. Mr. Clare did not wait to be answered. When the doctor was again ready to listen, he found a brisk discussion going on of a certain book which had of late appeared, purporting to describe a Socialistic Utopia in the year of our Lord 2000. “Oh! go away with your Socialism,” Father McClosky was saying vehemently; “sorra a word but ‘the Nation’ is in the man’s mouth from first to last; and a mighty fine word it is, too, with a history and a meaning in the old country, and without the bad associations of Socialism.” “Right, Father McClosky!” exclaimed the doctor. “When Socialists re-organize under the name of Nationalists, they will play a very strong card.” “I’m not a particularly brilliant statesman,” said Mr. Clare, “and you may be quite right about the strong card; but, from my point of view, I confess I should be sorry to see it played. There is too much organization now, on that side of the fence.” Dr. Richards took time for thought before he replied to this. He had come to feel a little shy of contradicting the man who never argued. “As political parties now stand in this country,” he said slowly, “another one would but add so much more to the corruption and bribery at present existing. Is that what you mean?” “Precisely. As matters now stand, the ideas which I am quite willing to call National are gaining new adherents every day, irrespective of party. And when a plant has once taken root, it isn’t well to be digging it up every day or two, to see how the process is going on.” “You are as sanguine as Bellamy himself, Mr. Clare,” said Alice. “I wonder if he really believes in his Boston of the future?” “He takes care to slur over the embryonic stages,” observed the doctor, laughing, “and present to us his Phœnix, the Nation, fully grown.”