She left him, and he went back to the fire and filled and lit his pipe. Her words touched him. They also struck a chord of memory. His ever-wandering mind went back to a scene in undergraduate days. It was the Corn Exchange at Cambridge, where the most famous of all American evangelists was holding one of a series of revivalist meetings. The great bare hall was packed with youths, who came, some to scoff and others to pray. The coarse-figured, bald-headed, brown-bearded man in black on the platform, with his homely phrase and (to polite undergraduate ears) terrible Yankee twang, was talking vehemently of the trivial instruments the Almighty used to effect His purposes. Moses's rod, for instance. "You can imagine Pharaoh," said he--and the echo of the great voice came to Septimus through the years--"you can imagine Pharaoh walking down the street one day and seeing Moses with a great big stick in his hand. 'Hallo, Moses,' says he, 'where are you going?' 'Where am I going?' says Moses. 'I guess I'm going to deliver the Children of Israel out of the House of Bondage and conduct them to a land flowing with milk and honey.' 'And how are you going to do it, Moses?' '_With this rod, sir, with this rod!_'" Septimus remembered how this bit of unauthenticated history was greeted with derision by the general, and with a shocked sense of propriety by the cultivated--and young men at the university can be very cultivated indeed on occasion. But the truth the great preacher intended to convey had lingered at the back of his own mind and now came out into the light. Perhaps Emmy had spoken more truly than she thought. In his simple heart he realized himself to be the least effectual of men, apparently as unhelpful towards a great deliverance as the walking stick used by Moses. But if God had sent him to Nunsmere Common and destined him to be the mean instrument of Emmy's deliverance? He rubbed the warm pipe bowl against his cheek and excogitated the matter in deep humility. Yes, perhaps God had sent him. His religious belief was nebulous, but up to its degree of clarity it was sincere. A few minutes later they were again in the cab jogging wearily across London to Southampton Row; and the little empty drawing-room with all its vanities looked somewhat ghostly, lit as it was by the day and by the frivolously shaded electric light which they had forgotten to switch off. CHAPTER X