“Ah! deacon, you’re shrewd--you are going to flatter me, but I can’t let you. I’m an old fogy and out of date. I’m not orthodox on the Negro from Boston’s point of view.” “Nonsense!” growled the deacon. “We don’t care what you or the Doctor either thinks about the Negro, or the Jap, or the Chinaman. We want a preacher imbued with the power of the Holy Ghost to preach the Gospel of Christ.” “Well, you have quite captured me since you have been here. You are a revelation to me of what a deacon might be to a pastor and his wife. To be frank with you, I am on your side. I am tired of the Negro. I don’t want to solve him. He is an impossible job from my point of view. I should be delighted to go to Boston now and begin life over again. But I do not figure in the decision. Dr. Durham settles such questions for himself. And I respect him more for it.” Encouraged by this decision of his wife the deacon renewed his efforts to change the Preacher’s mind next day in vain. He stayed over Sunday, heard him preach two sermons, and sorrowfully bade him good-bye on Monday. He carried back to Boston his final word declining this call. As the deacon stepped on the train, he warmly pressed his hand and said, “God bless you, Doctor. If you ever need a friend, you know my name and address.” CHAPTER XXII--THE FLESH AND THE SPIRIT GASTON tried to wait in patience another week for a word from the woman he loved, and when the last mail came and brought no letter for him, he found himself face to face with the deepest soul crisis of his life. After all, thoughts are things. The report of her social frivolities at first made little impression on him. But the thought had fallen in his heart, and it was growing a poisoned weed. It is possible to kill the human body with an idea. The fairest day the spring ever sent can be blackened and turned from sunshine into storm by the flitting of a little cloud of thought no bigger than a man’s hand. So Gaston found this report of dancing and flirting in a gay society by the woman whom he had enthroned in the holy of holies of his soul to be destroying his strength of character, and like a deadly cancer eating his heart out. He sat down by his window that night, unable to work, and tried to reconcile such a life with his ideal. “Why should I be so provincial!” he mused. “The thing only shocks me because I am unused to it. She has grown up in this atmosphere. To her it is a harmless pastime.” Then he took out of his desk her picture, lit his lamp and looked long and tenderly at it, until his soul was drunk again with the memory of her beauty, the warm touch of her hand, and the thrill of her full soft lips in the only two kisses he had ever received from the heart of a woman.