The aged evangelist could scarcely contain his contempt at this meager tally. "What would you say, Augustus," he demanded in eager, tremulous triumph, "to two hundred lost souls roaring up to the altar, casting off their wickedness like snakes shed their skins? Hey? Hey? What would you say to two hundred dipped in the blood of the lamb and emerging white as the Dove? Souls ain't what they were," he muttered pessimistically; "it used to be you could hear the Redeemed a spell of miles from the church, now they're as confidential as a man borrowing money. The Lord will in no wise acknowledge the faint in spirit." Suddenly, "Glory! Glory!" he shouted, and his old eyes flamed with the inextinguishable blaze of his enthusiasm. The minister's wife inserted in the door from the kitchen a face bright red from bending over the stove. "Now, pa," she admonished, "you'll scare them children again." XXVI The "board or so" to be replaced on the ice house, as Gordon had surmised, proved to be extensive--a large section of the inner wall had rotted from the constant dampness, the slowly seeping water. The ice house stood back of the dwelling, by the side of the small barn and beyond a number of apple trees: it was a square structure of boards, with no opening save a low door under the peak of the roof with a small platform and exterior flight of steps. In the gloomy, dank interior a rough ladder, fastened to the wall, led down to the falling level of soggy sawdust, embedded in which the irregular pieces of ice were preserved against the summer. From the interior the opening made a vivid square of blue sky; for long hours the blue increased in brilliancy, after which, veiled in a greyer haze of heat, the patch of sky grew gradually paler, and then clear; the suggestion of immeasurable space deepened; above the dark hole of the ice house the illimitable distance was appalling. Gordon was resting from the sullen, muffled knocking of his hammer when a figure suddenly blotted out the light, hid the sky. He recognized the sharply-cut silhouette of the school-teacher. "What a horrid, spooky place," she spoke with a shiver, peering within. "It's cool," Gordon told her indifferently. "And quiet," she added, seating herself upon the platform with an elbow in the opening; "there's none of the bothersome clatter of a lot of detestable children." She raised her voice in shrill mimicry, "'Teacher, kin I be excused? Teacher!... Teacher--!'" "Don't you like children?" "I loathe them," she shot at him, out of the depths of a profound, long-accumulated exasperation; "the muddy little beasts." "Then I wouldn't be vexed with them." "Do you like nailing boards in a rotten ice house?" "Oh, I'm dog poor; I've got to take anything that comes along." "And, you fool, do you suppose I'd be here if I had anything at all? Do you suppose I'd stay in this damn lost hole if I could get anywhere else? Do you think I have no more possibilities than this?"