"Miss Bolton, you do me injustice--not in what you say, but in the tone you say it in. No, it is not the giving up of the Apostleship that troubles me, though I did hope that I might help in my way to make the world a new earth; but it is the shock and downfall of their hopes to all those good earnest people, and especially--oh! especially, Miss Bolton, to my own dear father and mother." His eyes filled with tears as he spoke. "I can understand," said Meenie, sympathetically, her eyes dimming a little in response. "They have set their hearts all their lives long on your accomplishing this work, and it will be to them the disappointment of a cherished romance." They looked at one another a few minutes in silence. "How long have you begun to have your doubts?" Meenie asked after the pause. "A long time, but most of all since I saw you. It has made me--it has made me hesitate more about the fundamental article of our faith. Even now, I am not sure whether it is not wrong of me to be talking so with you about such matters." "I see," said Meenie, a little more archly; "it comes perilously near----" and she broke off, for she felt she had gone a step too far. "Perilously near falling in love," Paul continued boldly, turning his big eyes full upon her. "Yes, perilously near." Their eyes met; Meenie's fell; and they said no more. But they both felt they understood one another. Just at that moment the Professor's wife came up to interrupt the _tete-a-tete_; "for that young Owen," she said to herself, "is really getting quite too confidential with dear Meenie." That same evening Paul paced up and down his rooms in Peckwater with all his soul strangely upheaved within him and tossed and racked by a dozen conflicting doubts and passions. Had he gone too far? Had he yielded like Adam to the woman who beguiled him? Had he given way like Samson to the snares of Delilah? For the old Scripture phraseology and imagery, so long burned into his very nature, clung to him still in spite of all his faltering changes of opinion. Had he said more than he thought and felt about the Apostle? Even if he was going to revise his views, was it right, was it candid, was it loyal to the truth, that he should revise them under the biassing influence of Meenie's eyes? If only he could have separated the two questions--the Apostle's mission, and the something which he felt growing up within him! But he could not--and, as he suspected, for a most excellent reason, because the two were intimately bound up in the very warp and woof of his existence. Nature was asserting herself against the religious asceticism of the Apostle; it could not be so wrong for him to feel those feelings that had thrilled every heart in all his ancestors for innumerable generations.