“You are mistaken,” said Philip evenly. “I know of one, at least, who will go where he is needed.” “Then get him quick, for God’s sake! She’s dyin’; the bullet went clean through and come out at her back!” “Go on and keep her alive if you can,” Philip urged. “I’ll hurry.” Luckily, he found an idle two-horse hack standing in front of the American House, and he sprang in and gave his order, bidding high for haste. After a reckless race of a dozen blocks the hack halted in front of a house yarded in the same enclosure with a small brick church carrying a gilt cross on its gable; and Philip was relieved to see that, late as it was, there was still a light burning in the minister’s study. A heavy-set, fair-haired young man with the face of a wise and compassionate saint answered his ring. “I have come again, Father Goodwin,” he began hurriedly. “It’s a tragedy, this time. A woman has just been accidentally shot in the Corinthian theater, and I think she is dying. Can you come?” “She is not a Catholic?” “No.” “I’ll be with you in a moment.” On the galloping race to the appointed destination the young clergyman put an arm across Philip’s shoulders in the darkness of the hack’s interior. “Tell me, Philip: how long are you going to go on throwing yourself away? The other time you came to me from a woman dying in a brothel; and this time you come from the Corinthian. Doesn’t your life mean anything more to you than a wallowing in the mud?” “It did, once,” was the low-toned response. “But I have found out that it is one thing to knock the barriers down, and another to try to build them up again. As long as I hadn’t wallowed, it was easy not to. But one night the props went out all at once, and--well, I can’t seem to set them back again.” “They were not the right kind of props, Philip; you may be sure of that. Won’t you come and talk to me like a man, some time?” “Maybe,” said Philip; and then the hack was pulled up at the doorway of the darkened stairway. Philip led the way up the stairs and around the gallery-like upper corridor to a lighted room with an open door. The scene that revealed itself as he entered and stood aside to make way for the clergyman stunned him. The bed upon which the victim of the drunken miner’s chance bullet lay had been drawn out from the wall, and on one side of it a doctor, with Jean Dabney standing by to help as she could, was trying to determine the seriousness of the wound. On the other side of the bed knelt a man with graying hair, cold eyes and a hard-lined face which was now drawn and pinched and haggard as he stared at the still figure over which the doctor was working. Bromley caught Philip’s arm and took him apart from the others. “Jean knows, and I know,” he explained in a low whisper. “We had come down to see the sick old lady on the other side of the building. When they told me who this woman was, I went after your father. Don’t do anything to make it harder for him, Phil.”