“And her soul?” softly questioned the shadowed lips of the Missioner.

The other’s hand tightened slowly.

“In making her the angels forgot a soul, I guess,” he said.

“Then your friend did not love her.”  The Little Missioner’s voice was quick and decisive.  “There can be no love where there is no soul.”

“That is impossible.  He did love her.  I know it.”

“I still disagree with you.  Without knowing your friend, I say that he worshipped her beauty.  There were others who worshipped that same loveliness—­others who did not possess her, and who would have bartered their souls for her had they possessed souls to barter.  Is that not true?”

“Yes, there were others.  But to understand you must have known my friend before he sank down into the pit—­when he was still a man.  He was a great student.  His fortune was sufficient to give him both time and means for the pursuits he loved.  He had his great library, and adjoining it a laboratory.  He wrote books which few people read because they were filled with facts and odd theories.  He believed that the world was very old, and that there was less profit for men in discovering new luxuries for an artificial civilization than in re-discovering a few of the great laws and miracles buried in the dust of the past.  He believed that the nearer we get to the beginning of things, and not the farther we drift, the clearer comprehension can we have of earth and sky and God, and the meaning of it all.  He did not consider it an argument for progress that Christ and His disciples knew nothing of the telephone, of giant engines run by steam, of electricity, or of instruments by which man could send messages for thousands of miles through space.  His theory was that the patriarchs of old held a closer touch on the pulse of Life than progress in its present forms will ever bring to us.  He was not a fanatic.  He was not a crank.  He was young, and filled with enthusiasm.  He loved children.  He wanted to fill his home with them.  But his wife knew that she was too beautiful for that—­and they had none.”

He had leaned a little forward, and had pulled his hat a trifle over his eyes.  There was a moment’s lull in the storm, and it was so quiet that each could hear the ticking of Father Roland’s big silver watch.

Then he said: 

“I don’t know why I tell you all this, Father, unless it is to relieve my own mind.  There can be no hope that it will benefit my friend.  And yet it cannot harm him.  It seems very near to sacrilege to put into words what I am going to say about—­his wife.  Perhaps there were extenuating conditions for her.  I have tried to convince myself of that, just as he tried to believe it.  It may be that a man who is born into this age must consider himself a misfit unless he can tune himself in sympathy with its manner of life.  He cannot be too critical, I guess.  If he is to exist in a certain social order of our civilization