“She is quite alone in the world, poor thing!” he said after a pause.  “She must be earning her own living, somehow.  By journalism, perhaps.  But she prefers to live her own life.  I am afraid it will be a hard one.”  His voice trembled again.  The minister’s breast, too, was laboring with emotion that checked his speech, but after a moment utterance came to him—­a strange choked utterance, almost blasphemous from those clerical lips.

“By God!” he gasped.  “That little girl!”

He turned his back upon his friend and covered his face with his hands, and Raphael saw his shoulders quivering.  Then his own vision grew dim.  Conjecture, resentment, wonder, self-reproach, were lost in a new and absorbing sense of the pathos of the poor girl’s position.

Presently the minister turned round, showing a face that made no pretence of calm.

“That was bravely done,” he said brokenly.  “To cut herself adrift!  She will not sink; strength will be given her even as she gives others strength.  If I could only see her and tell her!  But she never liked me; she always distrusted me.  I was a hollow windbag in her eyes—­a thing of shams and cant—­she shuddered to look at me.  Was it not so?  You are a friend of hers, you know what she felt.”

“I don’t think it was you she disliked,” said Raphael in wondering pity.  “Only your office.”

“Then, by God, she was right!” cried the Russian hoarsely.  “It was this—­this that made me the target of her scorn.”  He tore off his white tie madly as he spoke, threw it on the ground, and trampled upon it.  “She and I were kindred in suffering; I read it in her eyes, averted as they were at the sight of this accursed thing!  You stare at me—­you think I have gone mad.  Leon, you are not as other men.  Can you not guess that this damnable white tie has been choking the life and manhood out of me?  But it is over now.  Take your pen, Leon, as you are my friend, and write what I shall dictate.”

Silenced by the stress of a great soul, half dazed by the strange, unexpected revelation, Raphael seated himself, took his pen, and wrote: 

“We understand that the Rev. Joseph Strelitski has resigned his position in the Kensington Synagogue.”

Not till he had written it did the full force of the paragraph overwhelm his soul.

“But you will not do this?” he said, looking up almost incredulously at the popular minister.

“I will; the position has become impossible.  Leon, do you not understand?  I am not what I was when I took it.  I have lived, and life is change.  Stagnation is death.  Surely you can understand, for you, too, have changed.  Cannot I read between the lines of your leaders?”

“Cannot you read in them?” said Raphael with a wan smile.  “I have modified some opinions, it is true, and developed others; but I have disguised none.”

“Not consciously, perhaps, but you do not speak all your thought.”