"I'm farther away than ever, Nance. Probably there's but one creature in this city to-day as out of place as I am. He's a big, awkward, country-looking dog, and he was lost on Broadway. Did you ever see a lost dog in a city street? This fellow was actually in a panic, wholly demoralised, and yet he seemed to know that he must conceal it for his own safety. So he affected a fine air of confidence, of being very busy about an engagement for which he feared he might be late. He would trot swiftly along for half a block, then pause as if trying to recall the street number; then trot a little farther, and stop to look back as if the other party to his engagement might happen along from that direction. It was a splendid bit of acting, and it deceived them all, in that street of mutterers and hard faces. He was like one of them, busy and hurried, but apparently cool, capable, and ominously alert. Only, in his moments of indecision, his eyes shifted the least bit nervously, as if to note whether the real fear he felt were detected, and then I could read all his secret consternation. "I'm the same lost dog, Nance. I feel as he felt every time I go into that street where the poor creatures hurry and talk to themselves from sheer nervous fatigue." He ceased speaking, but she remained silent, fearing lest she say too little or too much. "Nance," he said presently with a slow, whimsical glance, "I'm beginning to suspect that I'm even more of a fool than Hoover thought me--and he was rather enthusiastic about it, I assure you!" To which she at length answered musingly: "If God makes us fools, doubtless he likes to have us thorough. Be a great fool, Bernal. Don't be a small one." CHAPTER XIV THE INEFFECTIVE MESSAGE The week had gone while he walked in the crowds, feeling his remoteness; but he knew at last that he was not of the brotherhood of the zealots; that the very sense of humour by which he saw the fallacies of one zealot prevented him from becoming another. He lacked the zealot's conviction of his unique importance, yet one must be such a zealot to give a message effectively. He began to see that the world could not be lost; that whatever might be vital in his own message would, soon or late, be delivered by another. The time mattered not. Could he not be as reposeful, as patient, as God?