A woman, buried amid the pillows of a divan, rose as he entered and came towards him, her trailing skirts rustling over the velvet carpet. She was thin and gray-haired, with a faded beauty of face and a bitter mouth. She walked as if impatient of a slight lameness in her foot. "So you got my message," she said. "I waited for you all day yesterday. I am ill--ill and chained to this couch. I have not been to church for eight weeks, and I have needed the confessional. See, my nerves are trying me. If you had only come sooner." She threw herself upon the couch and he seated himself on a chair beside her. The heavily shaded lamplight fell over the richness of the room, over the Turkish rugs scattered upon the floor, over the hangings of old tapestries on the walls, and over the shining bric-a-brac reflected in long mirrors. As he leaned forward it fell upon his features and softened them to sudden beauty. "I am sorry," he answered, "but I could not come yesterday, and to-day a woman dying of cancer sent for me." She crushed a pillow beneath her arm, smiling a little bitterly. "Oh, it is your poor!" she said. "It is always your poor! We rich must learn to yield precedence--" "It is not a question of wealth or of poverty," he returned. "It is one of suffering. Can I help you?" The bitterness faded from her mouth. "You can let me believe in you," she said. "Don't you know that it is because you despise my money that I call for you? I might have sent for a hundred persons yesterday who would have outrun my messenger. But I could not bring you an instant sooner for all my wealth--no, not even for the sake of the church you love." "How do you know?" he asked, gravely. "Call no man unpurchasable until he has been bargained for." She looked at him passionately. "That is why I give to your church," she went on; "because to you my thousand counts no more than my laundress's dime." "But it does," he corrected; "and the church is grateful." "But you?" "I am the instrument of the church." "The pillar, you mean." He shook his head. There was no feeling in voice or eyes--but there was no hardness. "I love your church," she went on, more gently. "I love what you have made of it. I love religion because it produces men like you-- "Stop," he said, in a voice that flinched slightly. She raised her head with a gesture that had a touch of defiance. "Why should I stop?" she asked. "Do you think God will mind if I give His servant his due? Yesterday religion was nothing to me; to-day it is everything, and it is you who have been its revelation. Why should I not tell you so?" He was regarding her with intentness. "And you are happier?" he asked. "Happier! It is an odd word for a woman like me. I am fifty years old, I am alone, I am loveless. It has given me something to hope for, that is all." "Yes?" With a sudden yearning she stretched out her thin, white hands in appeal. "Talk to me," she said. "Make me feel it. I am so alone."