Jessica had seen the mustering crowd from the hotel entrance. Mrs. Halloran had welcomed her errand that day and given her her best room, a chamber overlooking the street. She had persuaded her visitor to spend the afternoon and insisted that she stay to supper, "just to see how she would like it for a steady diet." Now, as Jessica passed along toward the mountain road, the spectacle chained her feet on the outskirts of the gathering. She watched and listened with a preoccupied mind; she was thinking that on her way to the sanatorium she would cross to the cabin for a good-night word with the man upon whom her every thought centered. As it happened, however, Harry was at that moment very near her. Alone on the mountain, the perplexing conflict of feeling had again descended upon him. He had fought it, but it had prevailed, and at nightfall had driven him down to the town, where the street preacher now held forth. He stood alone, unnoted, a little distance away, near the court-house steps, where, by reason of the crowd, Jessica could see neither him nor the dog which sniffed at the heels of the circle of bystanders as if to inquire casually of salvation. Numbers were swelling now, and the street preacher, shaking back his long hair, drew a premonitory, wavering chord from his melodeon, and struck up a gospel song: "My days are gliding swiftly by, And I, a pilgrim stranger, Would not detain them as they fly, These hours of toil and danger. For Oh, we tread on Jordan's strand, Our friends are passing over, And just before the shining shore We may almost discover." The song ended, he mounted his camp-stool to propound his usual fiery text. The watcher by the steps was gazing with a strange, alert intentness. Something in the scene--the spluttering, dripping flame, the music, the forensic earnestness of the pilgrim--held him enthralled. The dormant sense that in the recent weeks had again and again stirred at some elusive touch of memory, was throbbing. Since last night, with its sudden lightning flash of the past that had faded again into blankness, he had been as sensitive as a photographic plate. Hallelujah Jones knew the melodramatic value of contrast. As his mood called, he passed abruptly from exhortation to song, from prayer to fulmination, and he embellished his harangue with anecdotes drawn from his lifelong campaign against the Arch-Enemy of Souls. Of what he had said the solitary observer had been quite unconscious. It was the _ensemble_--the repetition of something experienced somewhere before--that appealed to him. Suddenly, however, a chance phrase pierced to his understanding.