Now, even an earnest preacher is human, and a great many girls--though the healthy among us call them angels--are human. The engagement between the two was at this juncture broken off so squarely that the ends weren't even ragged, though there was left a possible sequence, not altogether black as midnight--a vague hope in the heart of each that the future might have something to it. This brought a few words more before they parted. Said the girl: "Show me a case of special providence and I will believe with you. It must be--it cannot possibly be otherwise--than that there should in some way, somehow, come an opportunity for showing that you are right and I wrong." The pale-faced man's eyes were burning as he looked at her. "The day will come!" he said. Time passed and the two worked together in social and church relations, but there was no more talk of marriage. It was one day in mid-July, a year after the conversation just described, when John Elwell was talking earnestly from his pulpit, and Jane Conant was one of the congregation. The preacher talked well that day--there is no denying it. He talked in a simple, straightforward but wonderfully eloquent way of how the quality of one's relation to others in this world must make easy or uneasy the path toward what is the better habitation after death. He told of the duties of the successful to the unsuccessful, of the strong to the weak; and he told too, of how, even in this world, each man's mind is accuser or justifier, and how, even in this world, come rewards and punishments, and how to him with faith enough should come immediate returns. With glowing face he even went aside a little to speak of those who talk too much of Nature and the Universe, and who believe that a general scheme is as true and strong and believable as one more definite--"'He noteth the sparrow's fall,'" he said. It was sultry within the church, and all seemed lifeless, though hearts were beating rapidly under the preacher's eloquence. There seemed no oxygen in the air; all was oppressive. There was no sound as the speaker closed a long and telling sentence, save the slight "swish" as a locust alighted on the sill of an open window. There was sound enough a moment later. Through the open doorway leaped a young man who shouted but one word: "Cyclone!" At the exclamation breaking in thus on the religious stillness perhaps one-fourth of the congregation started to their feet and rushed into the open air, but the three-fourths remained in their seats as if paralyzed. The preacher paused, looked about, and then with almost shining face spoke solemnly: "My friends, we are threatened with one of the visitations which God sometimes decrees, but which, it is my earnest belief, cannot harm those who believe in Him rightly and appeal to Him most trustingly. Let us pray that the cyclone will avoid this church."