“And you want my support and countenance in this heroic purpose? Well, John, I see no reason why I should discourage your eccentric but praiseworthy design. If you’ll amuse yourself with the papers for a few moments, I will get into a garb of a more devotional character than this old smoking-jacket. To go to church with John Fenton! That is a privilege that I had never hoped to win. But I’ve given up all hope of understanding you, John. You’re a puzzle I can’t solve.” With these words Richard entered an inner room, and left John Fenton to puff his cigar, and glance indifferently over the newspapers. It is seldom that a true journalist cannot find occupation, even excitement, in the latest edition of the newspaper with which he is connected; but, for some reason or other, Fenton was in no mood to take his usual professional interest in the Sunday make-up of the _Trumpet_, and when Richard returned to the room he found his friend standing at the window, and gazing dreamily into the street. A quarter of an hour later the two friends were seated in one of the rear pews of a church that had kept pace with the demands that the modern love of luxury makes on the outward and visible signs of an inward and spiritual cult. An agnostic, even an atheist, would have felt a reverential awe in such surroundings, an inclination to worship something, if it was nothing but the beauty of interior decoration, as an abstract influence, or the concrete glory of well-dressed women. There is something for all men in a church that frowns not on the æsthetic pleasures that the eye and ear can taste. As they rose at the opening words of the service, “The Lord is in his holy temple, let all the earth keep silence before him,” Richard’s eye followed Fenton’s, and a new light broke upon his mind. His friend was not as inexplicably eccentric as he had considered him. About half-way between them and the altar, and at an angle that placed her in full view from where they stood, Richard saw Gertrude Van Vleck, a striking figure even in that gathering of women of fashion. He turned on the instant, and his eyes looked into Fenton’s. He could not repress a smile that impressed its meaning upon the latter, whose face bore an expression of mingled satisfaction and annoyance as he knelt to join in the general confession. His satisfaction was caused by the fact that he could watch Gertrude Van Vleck, unobserved by her, for an entire morning. His annoyance was due to the mocking light in Richard’s glance.