The Christian. Sir Hall Caine

comforted the broken-hearted—and what have you done with them? You have bartered them for benefices, and peddled them for popularity; you have given them in exchange for money, for houses, for furniture, for things like this—and this—and this! You have sold your birthright for a mess of pottage, therefore you are the prostitute!”

      “You're not yourself, sir; leave me,” and, crossing the room, the canon touched the bell.

      “Yes, ten thousand times more the prostitute than that poor fallen girl with her taint of blood and will! There would be no such women as she is to fall victims to evil companionship if there were no such men as you are to excuse their betrayers and to side with them. Who is most the prostitute—the woman who sells her body, or the man who sells his soul?”

      “You're mad, sir! But I want no scene——”

      “You are the worst prostitute on the streets of London, and yet you are in the Church, in the pulpit, and you call yourself a follower of the One who forgave the woman and shamed the hypocrites, and had not where to lay his head!”

      But the canon had faced about and fled out of the room.

      The footman came in answer to the bell, and, finding no one but John Storm, he told him that a lady was waiting for him in a carriage at the door.

      It was Mrs. Callender. She had come to say that she had called at the hospital for Polly Love, and the girl had refused to go to the home at Soho.

      “But whatever's amiss with ye, man?” she said. “You might have seen a ghost!”

      He had come out bareheaded, carrying his hat in his hand.

      “It's all over,” he said. “I've waited weeks and weeks for it, but it's over at last. It was of no use mincing matters, so I spoke out.”

      His red eyes were ablaze, but a great load seemed to be lifted off his mind, and his soul seemed to exult.

      “I have told him I must leave him, and I am to go, immediately. The disease was dire, and the remedy had to be dire also.”

      The old lady was holding her breath and watching his flushed face with strained attention.

      “And what may ye be going to do now?”

      “To become a religious in something more than the name; to leave the world altogether with its idleness and pomp and hypocrisy and unreality.”

      “Get yoursel' some flesh on your bones first, man. It's easy to see ye've no been sleeping or eating these days and days together.”

      “That's nothing—nothing at all. God can not take half your soul. You must give yourself entirely.”

      “Eh, laddie, laddie, I feared me this was what ye were coming til. But a man can not bury himself before he is dead. He may bury the half of himself, but is it the better half? What of his thoughts—his wandering thoughts? Choose for yoursel', though, and if you must go—if you must hide yoursel' forever, and this is the last I'm to see of ye—ye may kiss me, laddie—I'm old enough, surely.—Go on, James, man, what for are ye sitting up there staring?”

      When John Storm returned to his room he found a letter from Parson Quayle. It was a good-natured, cackling epistle, full of sweet nothings about Glory and the hospital, about Peel and the discovery of ancient ruins in the graveyards of the treen chapels, but it closed with this postscript:

      “You will remember old Chalse, a sort of itinerant beggar and the privileged pet of everybody. The silly old gawk has got hold of your father and has actually made the old man believe that you are bewitched! Some one has put the evil eye on you—some woman it would seem—and that is the reason why you have broken away and behaved so strangely! It is most extraordinary. That such a foolish superstition should have taken hold of a man like your father is really quite astonishing, but if it will only soften his rancour against you and help to restore peace we may perhaps forgive the distrust of Providence and the outrage on common sense. All's well that ends well, you know, and we shall all be happy.”