“The world will some day grope its way into some kind of an understanding of its extraordinary men. Now they suffer terribly. In success or in such failures as has come to this imaginative, strangely perverted Irishman their lot is pitiful. It is only the common, the plain, unthinking man who slides peacefully through this troubled world.” At the house Jane McPherson sat waiting for her boy. She was thinking of the scene in the church and a hard light was in her eyes. Sam went past the sleeping room of his parents, where Windy McPherson snored peacefully, and up the stairway to his own room. He undressed and, putting out the light, knelt upon the floor. From the wild ravings of the man in the jail he had got hold of something. In the midst of the blasphemy of Mike McCarthy he had sensed a deep and abiding love of life. Where the church had failed the bold sensualist succeeded. Sam felt that he could have prayed in the presence of the entire town. “Oh, Father!” he cried, sending up his voice in the silence of the little room, “make me stick to the thought that the right living of this, my life, is my duty to you.” By the door below, while Valmore waited on the sidewalk, Telfer talked to Jane McPherson. “I wanted Sam to hear,” he explained. “He needs a religion. All young men need a religion. I wanted him to hear how even a man like Mike McCarthy keeps instinctively trying to justify himself before God.” CHAPTER IV John Telfer’s friendship was a formative influence upon Sam McPherson. His father’s worthlessness and the growing realisation of the hardship of his mother’s position had given life a bitter taste in his mouth, and Telfer sweetened it. He entered with zeal into Sam’s thoughts and dreams, and tried valiantly to arouse in the quiet, industrious, money-making boy some of his own love of life and beauty. At night, as the two walked down country roads, the man would stop and, waving his arms about, quote Poe or Browning or, in another mood, would compel Sam’s attention to the rare smell of a hayfield or to a moonlit stretch of meadow. Before people gathered on the streets he teased the boy, calling him a little money grubber and saying, “He is like a little mole that works underground. As the mole goes for a worm so this boy goes for a five-cent piece. I have watched him. A travelling man goes out of town leaving a stray dime or nickel here and within an hour it is in this boy’s pocket. I have talked to banker Walker of him. He trembles lest his vaults become too small to hold the wealth of this young Croesus. The day will come when he will buy the town and put it into his vest pocket.”