“I may not be a brilliant woman,” she said sweetly, “but I certainly have a great future before me. I’m going to live and reign with Jesus Christ some day, and I don’t really think it matters so very much whether I’m brilliant down here or not with that in view. But you’ll have to excuse me from any further talk on this subject. You have cast a slur on my faith and we really haven’t anything in common when you do that. I _know_ my Christ, and you don’t seem to. I must go now.” She swept out of his office, whither he had summoned her on pretext of consulting her about some of her scholars who were to be promoted. There was something so final about her going that it quite depressed him, and after a night’s wakefulness he went to see her, and had the good grace to apologize to her, and to say he would like her to try and show him what she meant by her faith. “If you will come to the church where I go you will find out much better than I can teach you,” she said, for she did not more than half believe that he wanted to know. So he agreed to go with her the following Sunday evening, and she began to mention his name in her prayers as she knelt in the moonlight in her little room. “Dear Father, show me how to make him understand,” she prayed. But always her prayer ended with: “Find Darcy please, and don’t let him lose the way home, for Christ’s sake.” CHAPTER XXIII Matters had come to such a pass in the Massey home that Eugene and his wife scarcely had a pleasant word to say to one another, and Nan spent much time in weeping. She had ransacked the house to find some papers of her mother-in-law’s that would prove that the house was theirs, but had found nothing. On the contrary, there were letters and papers that showed that both Gene’s mother and his aunt had always known that the house belonged to Joyce. There were also references to “money” and Nan began to fear that Gene and she would have nothing. Gene’s business wasn’t very good, and it had been growing worse of late, because he was so distracted by this matter of the will that he scarcely gave any attention at all to it; and Nan was running up terrible bills which she dared not tell him about, hoping every day that Joyce would turn up and matters would straighten out. But Joyce did not return, and every day the bills grew. At first, when she found them, Nan considered burning these letters that said so much about the property, but after reading them carefully over again, she was afraid to do so, lest somehow that would be only making a bad matter worse. What if Joyce knew of these letters and should return some day and demand them? So she purchased a strong metal box, locked them therein and hid them among her own private possessions. If they were ever demanded she could say she had put them away for safe-keeping. If they were not, and it came out that the house was theirs after all, she could easily burn them sometime.