I slipped out behind him, glad enough of Urkey's raw air after that close chamber of mysteries. I avoided the wharf-lane, however, more than a little scared by this sudden new aspect of the Minister, and got myself out to the shore street by Miah White's yard and the grocery porch, and there I found myself face to face with Mate Snow. That frightened me still more, for the light from Henny's Notions' window was shining oddly in his eyes. "You're lookin' for the minister," I stammered, ducking my head. He stopped and stared down at me, tapping a sole on the cobbles. "What's this? What's this?" "He--he says you'd be lookin' for 'im, an' I seen 'im to the Chinaman's an' he's comin' right there, honest he is, Mr. Snow." "Oh! So? I'd be looking for him, would I?" "Y--y--yessir." I sank down on the grocery steps and studied my toes. "He was _there_, though!" I protested in desperation, when we had been waiting in vain for a long quarter-hour. The dark monitor lifted his chin from his collar and looked at his watch. "It's hard," I heard him sigh, as he turned away down Lovett's Court, where Center Church blossomed with its prayer-meeting lamps. Shadows of the uneasy flock moved across the windows; Emsy Nickerson, in his trustee's black, peered out of the door into the dubious night, and beyond him in the bright vestry Aunt Nickerson made a little spot of color, agitated, nursing formless despairs, an artist in vague dreads. I was near enough, at the church steps, to hear what Mate told them. "I'll lead to-night. He's gone out in the back-country to pray alone." Aunt Nickerson wept quietly, peeping from the corners of her eyes. Reverent awe struggled with an old rebellion in Emsy's face, and in others as they came crowding. The trustee broke out bitterly: "Miah White's took to the bottle again, along o' him. If only he'd do his prayin' at Miah's house a spell, 'stead o' the back-country--" "There was a back-country in Judea," Mate cried him down. "And some one prayed there, not one night, but forty nights and days!" What a far cry it was from the thwarted lover behind the prescription screen, fanning the flames of hell-fire through the night, to the Seer thundering in the vestry--had there been any there with heads enough to wonder at it. It happened from time to time, this mysterious retreat into the moors, more frequently as the Infield Conference drew on and the hollows deepened in the minister's cheeks and his eyes shone brighter with foreboding. Nor was this the first time the back-country had been mentioned in the same breath with the Wilderness of Judea. I can remember our Miss Beedie, in Sunday School, lifting her eyes and sighing at the first verse of the fourth chapter of the Book of Luke. And to-night, while I crept off tingling through the dark of Lovett's Court, he was in the Wilderness again, and I had seen him last.