And deliberately he put on his hat and left the room. The net result of the meeting was a vote to reduce the pastor's salary a thousand dollars and add it to the music fund; and Van Meter hired two detectives to watch the minister. CHAPTER VII A STOLEN KISS For several weeks after Gordon flung down the gauntlet to his Board of Trustees and began his battle for supremacy, his wife maintained a strange attitude of silence and reserve. She had hired a nurse and resumed her study of music. Her contralto voice, one of great depth and sweetness, he had admired extravagantly in the days of their courtship, but she had ceased to sing of late years. He always listened to her lullaby to the children with fascination. The soft round notes from her delicate throat seemed full of magic and held him in a spell. Before he left for his study one morning, she looked up into his face with yearning in her dark eyes. "Come into the parlour, Frank; I will sing for you." She took her seat at the piano, and her white tapering fingers ran lightly over the keys with deft, sure touch. "What would you like to hear?" she asked timidly, from beneath her long lashes, with the old haunting charm in her manner. "Tennyson's 'Break, break, break, on thy cold gray stones, O Sea!' No poet ever dreamed that song as you have sung it, Ruth." Never did he hear her sing with such feeling. Her Voice, low, soft and caressing with the languid sensuousness of the South, quivered with tenderness, and then rose with the storm and broke in round, deep peals of passion until he could hear the roar of the surf and feel its white spray in his face. Her erect lithe figure, with the small white hands and wrists flashing over the keys, the petite anxious face with stormy eyes and raven hair, seemed the incarnate soul of the storm. "Glorious, Ruth!" he cried, with boylike wonder. And then she bent over the piano and burst into tears. "Why, what ails you, my dear?" "Oh, Frank, I'm selfish to leave the children to a nurse and study music." "Nonsense. Self-sacrifice is rational only as it is the highest form of self-development. It is your duty to develop yourself. Self is the source of all knowledge and strength; books are its record; the world exists only through its eyes." "I'm afraid of it. I wish to give all to you and the children, not to myself. I want you all to myself, and you are growing away from me. I know it, and it is breaking my heart." He laughed at her fears, kissed her and went to his study.