He thought much as he took his way on foot through the world, and began to feel himself a pilgrim on a holy quest, not a knight, for his self-confidence had been too badly shaken for that. He had not so much the feeling that she needed him and he could help her to her inheritance if he found her, as he had the need of her in his soul. It seemed sometimes that he could not live until he had unburdened his soul by confession to her and had told her he would sin that way no more. He wanted her restored confidence, her clear-eyed smile, the feeling that she was his friend, though ever so far away, that there was something sweet and true between them. He had never thought of her as his in any way except as a guiding star, but now that he had lost that star, his life seemed all awry, as if he could not go on without her, as if all was darkness and horror, that she should think of him as one so unworthy. As he thought out his pilgrimage before him it occurred to him that the churches should be his goal. He knew that she always went to service, to prayer meetings, and Sunday School, and morning and evening church gatherings. There was his key to the situation. If she were still in the land of the living, if nothing evil had befallen her, she would be at some place of worship at the time appointed. And so, when a bell from some steeple rang a call to worship, he would pause, and wait, and watch the worshippers till all were in, or if he passed an open church door he would enter, sit down and gaze about until he had searched every face, and was sure she was not there. Then he would quietly get up and leave. Seldom did he hear the service that went on about him, seldom pretended to listen. He was there but for one purpose, and he had no time to waste. Words indeed passed through his consciousness as they were spoken, in story or song, but they left no impression there. He was not a scoffer at religious things. They had simply never touched him. He stood on the outside of them. Except for that one afternoon in his life when he had sat in the dim aisles of the grove and listened to Mary Massey reading the story of the blind man, he had never really taken heed to the Bible. Oh, he had heard it read in school, of course, and now and then in a service that some strange fancy carried him to as a boy, never in Sunday School, for he had not been sent there, and it was not a place he would have chosen to go because it meant confinement in the house when one might be out-of-doors. He had always been a law unto himself and he was rather proud of the fact. Now a great depression was upon him because he felt he had not kept his own law. It was Joyce’s clear eyes, her keen question, that made him see that in breaking the law of his land, he had broken also the law of that inner, finer self. It was in his thoughts of her that he came to see that there was always something behind a law, it was never just a law. What was that in Mary Massey’s prayer so long ago?