Routledge leaned back with a cigarette, which with him was only an occasional indulgence. “As I say, I meet him every second year in my wanderings, and I am always healed from the jangle of the world and world-politics after a day with Rawder,” he resumed, watching her. “He had a strangely unattractive face as a boy--slow with that dullness which sometimes goes with the deaf, and a moist, diffused pallor that suggests epilepsy. His original home was away up in a New England village, restricted as a mortise-box in its thought and heart. The Rawders were a large, brief family--six or seven children--the whole in harrowing poverty. Certain of the littler ones were hare-lipped; all were the fright of other children. I never liked New England.... I can see yet the gray, unpainted house of the Rawders, high on a barren hill against the gray, bitter sky--rags in the broken window-panes; voices in the house that you could not forget, yet loathed to remember.... All died in a year except this boy who became my friend. All met the Reaper without pomp or heraldry, the funerals overlapping, so that the village was dazed, and the name of Rawder stands to-day for Old Mortality at his worst. So there was left only this one, a strange, wordless type of Failure in the eyes of the village. “He was a little older than I--but a sort of slave of mine. I see it now. I had everything that good family and parental wisdom could bless a boy with, and he had nothing. That I pitied him seemed to warm his soul with gratitude. He expected so little and was willing to give so much. I wish I had understood better then.... He aspired to the ministry, but his ordination was long denied him. He was second in his class after years of study in a theological school, earned with incredible penury, but his trial sermon or something about him shocked the community. I know now that it was a wider, gentler piety. About this time I had come in from my first trip around the world. Unable to get a church, he asked for a foreign mission, the smallest mission in the loneliest, most dreadful land. His answer was a whisper through the assembly of preachers, challenging his sanity. Forgive them, as he did, Miss Noreen. I could not have fully understood the features of his tragedy, but I remember that when I parted from him that time, there was a vague desolation in my heart. I could not forget the deep, troubled eyes nor the heavy homely face, all scourged with harshness from a babe, a veritable magnet of evil fortunes. “Back from England again, I encountered him in Boston under the banners and torches of the Salvation Army. He was thinner, deeper-eyed, richer-voiced, and all animate with love for his race. For the first time I felt the real spell of the man. It was something in his eyes, I think--something that you see in the eyes of a little child that is dying without pain.” “Visions,” she whispered.