Rimmon groaned helplessly.

“Come; there is the note.  Sign.”

Rimmon began to expostulate, and finally refused pointblank to sign.  Wickersham gazed at him with amusement.

“You sign that, or I will serve suit on you in a half-hour, and we will see how the Rev. Mr. Rimmmon stands when my lawyers are through with him.  You will believe in hell then, sure enough.”

“You won’t dare do it.  Your marriage would come out.  Mrs. Lancaster would—­”

“She knows it,” said Wickersham, calmly.  And, as Rimmon looked sceptical, “I told her myself to spare you the trouble.  Sign.”  He rose and touched a bell.

Rimmon, with a groan, signed the paper.

“You must have showed her my letter!”

“Of course, I did.”

“But you promised me not to.  I am ruined!”

“What have I to do with that?  ‘See thou to that,’” said Wickersham, with a bitter laugh.

Rimmon’s face paled at the quotation.  He, too, had betrayed his Lord.

“Now go.”  Wickersham pointed to the door.

Mr. Rimmon went home and tried to write a letter to Mrs. Lancaster, but he could not master his thoughts.  That pen that usually flowed so glibly failed to obey him.  He was in darkness.  He saw himself dishonored, displaced.  Wickersham was capable of anything.  He did not know where to turn.  He thought of his brother clergymen.  He knew many good men who spent their lives helping others.  But something deterred him from applying to them now.  To some he had been indifferent, others he had known only socially.  Yet others had withdrawn themselves from him more and more of late.  He had attributed it to their envy or their folly.  He suddenly thought of old Dr. Templeton.  He had always ignored that old man as a sort of crack-brained creature who had not been able to keep up with the world, and had been left stranded, doing the work that properly belonged to the unsuccessful.  Curiously enough, he was the one to whom the unhappy man now turned.  Besides, he was a friend of Mrs. Lancaster.

A half-hour later the Rev. Mr. Rimmon was in Dr. Templeton’s simple study, and was finding a singular sense of relief in pouring out his troubles to the old clergyman.  He told him something of his unhappy situation—­not all, it is true, but enough to enable the other to see how grave it was, as much from what he inferred as from what Rimmon explained.  He even began to hope again.  If the Doctor would undertake to straighten out the complications he might yet pull through.  To his dismay, this phase of the matter did not appear to present itself to the old man’s mind.  It was the sin that he had committed that had touched him.

“Let us carry it where only we can find relief;” he said.  “Let us take it to the Throne of Grace, where we can lay all our burdens”; and before Rimmon knew it, he was on his knees, praying for him as if he had been a very outcast.