Mr. Ware carefully deposited an armful of pamphlets on the rug at his feet, and sat down.  Litter was indeed the word for what he saw about him.  Bookcases, chairs, tables, the corners of the floor, were all buried deep under disorderly strata of papers, diagrams, and opened books.  One could hardly walk about without treading on them.  The dust which danced up into the bar of sunshine streaming in from the window, as the doctor stepped across to another chair, gave Theron new ideas about the value of Chinese servants.

“I must thank you, first of all, doctor,” he began, “for your kindness in coming when I was ill.  ‘I was sick, and ye visited me.’”

“You mustn’t think of it that way,” said Ledsmar; “your friend came for me, and of course I went; and gladly too.  There was nothing that I could do, or that anybody could do.  Very interesting man, that friend of yours.  And his wife, too—­both quite out of the common.  I don’t know when I’ve seen two such really genuine people.  I should like to have known more of them.  Are they still here?”

“They went yesterday,” Theron replied.  His earlier shyness had worn off, and he felt comfortably at his ease.  “I don’t know,” he went on, “that the word ‘genuine’ is just what would have occurred to me to describe the Soulsbys.  They are very interesting people, as you say—­most interesting—­and there was a time, I dare say, when I should have believed in their sincerity.  But of course I saw them and their performance from the inside—­like one on the stage of a theatre, you know, instead of in the audience, and—­well, I understand things better than I used to.”

The doctor looked over his spectacles at him with a suggestion of inquiry in his glance, and Theron continued:  “I had several long talks with her; she told me very frankly the whole story of her life—­and and it was decidedly queer, I can assure you!  I may say to you—­you will understand what I mean—­that since my talk with you, and the books you lent me, I see many things differently.  Indeed, when I think upon it sometimes my old state of mind seems quite incredible to me.  I can use no word for my new state short of illumination.”

Dr. Ledsmar continued to regard his guest with that calm, interrogatory scrutiny of his.  He did not seem disposed to take up the great issue of illumination.  “I suppose,” he said after a little, “no woman can come in contact with a priest for any length of time without telling him the ‘story of her life,’ as you call it.  They all do it.  The thing amounts to a law.”

The young minister’s veins responded with a pleasurable thrill to the use of the word “priest” in obvious allusion to himself.  “Perhaps in fairness I ought to explain,” he said, “that in her case it was only done in the course of a long talk about myself.  I might say that it was by way of kindly warning to me.  She saw how I had become unsettled in many—­many of my former views—­and she was nervous lest this should lead me to—­to—­”