Tell me, do you feel strong enough to go in next door and attend the trustees' meeting this forenoon? It's rather important that you should be there, if you can spur yourself up to it. By the way, you haven't asked what happened at the Quarterly Conference yesterday."

Theron sighed, and made a little grimace of repugnance. "If you knew how little I cared!" he said. "I did hope you'd forget all about mentioning that--and everything else connected with--the next door. You talk so much more interestingly about other things."

"Here's grat.i.tude for you!" exclaimed Sister Soulsby, with a gay simulation of despair. "Why, man alive, do you know what I've done for you? I got around on the Presiding Elder's blind side, I captured old Pierce, I wound Winch right around my little finger, I worked two or three of the cla.s.s-leaders--all on your account. The result was you went through as if you'd had your ears pinned back, and been greased all over. You've got an extra hundred dollars added to your salary; do you hear? On the sixth question of the order of business the Elder ruled that the recommendation of the last conference's estimating committee could be revised (between ourselves he was wrong, but that doesn't matter), and so you're in clover. And very friendly things were said about you, too."

"It was very kind of you," said Theron. "I am really extremely grateful to you." He shook her by the hand to make up for what he realized to be a lack of fervor in his tones.

"Well, then," Sister Soulsby replied, "you pull yourself together, and take your place as chairman of the trustees' meeting, and see to it that, whatever comes up, you side with old Pierce and Winch."

"Oh, THEY'RE my friends now, are they?" asked Theron, with a faint play of irony about his lips.

"Yes, that's your ticket this election," she answered briskly, "and mind you vote it straight. Don't bother about reasons now. Just take it from me, as the song says, 'that things have changed since Willie died.'

That's all. And then come back here, and this afternoon we'll have a good old-fashioned jaw."

The Rev. Mr. Ware, walking with ostentatious feebleness, and forcing a conventional smile upon his wan face, duly made his unexpected appearance at the trustees' meeting in one of the smaller cla.s.srooms. He received their congratulations gravely, and shook hands with all three.

It required an effort to do this impartially, because, upon sight of Levi Gorringe, there rose up suddenly within him an emotion of fierce dislike and enmity. In some enigmatic way his thoughts had kept themselves away from Gorringe ever since Sunday evening. Now they concentrated with furious energy and swiftness upon him. Theron seemed able in a flash of time to coordinate many recollections of Gorringe--the early liking Alice had professed for him, the mystery of those purchased plants in her garden, the story of the girl he had lost in church, his offer to lend him money, the way in which he had sat beside Alice at the love-feast and followed her to the altar-rail in the evening. These raced abreast through the young minister's brain, yet with each its own image, and its relation to the others clearly defined.

He found the nerve, all the same, to take this third trustee by the hand, and to thank him for his congratulations, and even to say, with a surface smile of welcome, "It is BROTHER Gorringe, now, I remember."

The work before the meeting was chiefly of a routine kind. In most places this would have been transacted by the stewards; but in Octavius these minor officials had degenerated into mere ceremonial abstractions, who humbly ratified, or by arrangement antic.i.p.ated, the will of the powerful, mortgage-owning trustees. Theron sat languidly at the head of the table while these common-place matters pa.s.sed in their course, noting the intonations of Gorringe's voice as he read from his secretary's book, and finding his ear displeased by them. No issue arose upon any of these trivial affairs, and the minister, feeling faint and weary in the heat, wondered why Sister Soulsby had insisted on his coming.

All at once he sat up straight, with an instinctive warning in his mind that here was the thing. Gorringe had taken up the subject of the "debt-raising" evening, and read out its essentials as they had been embodied in a report of the stewards. The gross sum obtained, in cash and promises, was $1,860. The stewards had collected of this a trifle less than half, but hoped to get it all in during the ensuing quarter.

There were, also, the bill of Mr. and Mrs. Soulsby for $150, and the increases of $100 in the pastor's salary and $25 in the apportioned contribution of the charge toward the Presiding Elder's maintenance, the two latter items of which the Quarterly Conference had sanctioned.

"I want to hear the names of the subscribers and their amounts read out," put in Brother Pierce.

When this was done, it became apparent that much more than half of the entire amount had been offered by two men. Levi Gorringe's $450 and Erastus Winch's $425 left only $985 to be divided up among some seventy or eighty other members of the congregation.

Brother Pierce speedily stopped the reading of these subordinate names.

"They're of no concern whatever," he said, despite the fact that his own might have been reached in time. "Those first names are what I was getting at. Have those two first amounts, the big ones, be'n paid?"

"One has--the other not," replied Gorringe.

"PRE-cisely," remarked the senior trustee. "And I'm goin' to move that it needn't be paid, either. When Brother Winch, here, began hollerin'

out those extra twenty-fives and fifties, that evening, it was under a complete misapprehension. He'd be'n on the Cheese Board that same Monday afternoon, and he'd done what he thought was a mighty big stroke of business, and he felt liberal according. I know just what that feelin'

is myself. If I'd be'n makin' a mint o' money, instead o' losin' all the while, as I do, I'd 'a' done just the same. But the next day, lo, and behold, Brother Winch found that it was all a mistake--he hadn't made a single penny."

"Fact is, I lost by the whole transaction," put in Erastus Winch, defiantly.

"Just so," Brother Pierce went on. "He lost money. You have his own word for it. Well, then, I say it would be a burning shame for us to consent to touch one penny of what he offered to give, in the fullness of his heart, while he was laborin' under that delusion. And I move he be not asked for it. We've got quite as much as we need, without it. I put my motion."

"That is, YOU don't put it," suggested Winch, correctingly. "You move it, and Brother Ware, whom we're all so glad to see able to come and preside--he'll put it."

There was a moment's silence. "You've heard the motion," said Theron, tentatively, and then paused for possible remarks. He was not going to meddle in this thing himself, and Gorringe was the only other who might have an opinion to offer. The necessities of the situation forced him to glance at the lawyer inquiringly. He did so, and turned his eyes away again like a shot. Gorringe was looking him squarely in the face, and the look was freighted with satirical contempt.

The young minister spoke between clinched teeth. "All those in favor will say aye."

Brothers Pierce and Winch put up a simultaneous and confident "Aye."

"No, you don't!" interposed the lawyer, with deliberate, sneering emphasis. "I decidedly protest against Winch's voting. He's directly interested, and he mustn't vote. Your chairman knows that perfectly well."

"Yes, I think Brother Winch ought not to vote," decided Theron, with great calmness. He saw now what was coming, and underneath his surface composure there were sharp flutterings.

"Very well, then," said Gorringe. "I vote no, and it's a tie. It rests with the chairman now to cast the deciding vote, and say whether this interesting arrangement shall go through or not."

"Me?" said Theron, eying the lawyer with a cool self-control which had come all at once to him. "Me? Oh, I vote Aye."

CHAPTER XVII

"Well, I did what you told me to do," Theron Ware remarked to Sister Soulsby, when at last they found themselves alone in the sitting-room after the midday meal.

It had taken not a little strategic skirmishing to secure the room to themselves for the hospitable Alice, much touched by the thought of her new friend's departure that very evening had gladly proposed to let all the work stand over until night, and devote herself entirely to Sister Soulsby. When, finally, Brother Soulsby conceived and deftly executed the coup of interesting her in the budding of roses, and then leading her off into the garden to see with her own eyes how it was done, Theron had a sense of being left alone with a conspirator. The notion impelled him to plunge at once into the heart of their mystery.

"I did what you told me to do," he repeated, looking up from his low easy-chair to where she sat by the desk; "and I dare say you won't be surprised when I add that I have no respect for myself for doing it."

"And yet you would go and do it right over again, eh?" the woman said, in bright, pert tones, nodding her head, and smiling at him with roguish, comprehending eyes. "Yes, that's the way we're built. We spend our lives doing that sort of thing."

"I don't know that you would precisely grasp my meaning," said the young minister, with a polite effort in his words to mask the untoward side of the suggestion. "It is a matter of conscience with me; and I am pained and shocked at myself."

Sister Soulsby drummed for an absent moment with her thin, nervous fingers on the desk-top. "I guess maybe you'd better go and lie down again," she said gently. "You're a sick man, still, and it's no good your worrying your head just now with things of this sort. You'll see them differently when you're quite yourself again."

"No, no," pleaded Theron. "Do let us have our talk out! I'm all right.

My mind is clear as a bell. Truly, I've really counted on this talk with you."

"But there's something else to talk about, isn't there, besides--besides your conscience?" she asked. Her eyes bent upon him a kindly pressure as she spoke, which took all possible harshness from her meaning.

Theron answered the glance rather than her words. "I know that you are my friend," he said simply.

Sister Soulsby straightened herself, and looked down upon him with a new intentness. "Well, then," she began, "let's thrash this thing out right now, and be done with it. You say it's hurt your conscience to do just one little hundredth part of what there was to be done here. Ask yourself what you mean by that. Mind, I'm not quarrelling, and I'm not thinking about anything except just your own state of mind. You think you soiled your hands by doing what you did. That is to say, you wanted ALL the dirty work done by other people. That's it, isn't it?"

"The Rev. Mr. Ware sat up, in turn, and looked doubtingly into his companion's face.

"Oh, we were going to be frank, you know," she added, with a pleasant play of mingled mirth and honest liking in her eyes.

"No," he said, picking his words, "my point would rather be that--that there ought not to have been any of what you yourself call this--this 'dirty work.' THAT is my feeling."

"Now we're getting at it," said Sister Soulsby, briskly. "My dear friend, you might just as well say that potatoes are unclean and unfit to eat because manure is put into the ground they grow in. Just look at the case. Your church here was running behind every year. Your people had got into a habit of putting in nickels instead of dimes, and letting you sweat for the difference. That's a habit, like tobacco, or biting your fingernails, or anything else. Either you were all to come to smash here, or the people had to be shaken up, stood on their heads, broken of their habit. It's my business--mine and Soulsby's--to do that sort of thing. We came here and we did it--did it up brown, too. We not only raised all the money the church needs, and to spare, but I took a personal shine to you, and went out of my way to fix up things for you. It isn't only the extra hundred dollars, but the whole tone of the congregation is changed toward you now. You'll see that they'll be asking to have you back here, next spring. And you're solid with your Presiding Elder, too. Well, now, tell me straight--is that worth while, or not?"

"I've told you that I am very grateful," answered the minister, "and I say it again, and I shall never be tired of repeating it. But--but it was the means I had in mind."

"Quite so," rejoined the sister, patiently. "If you saw the way a hotel dinner was cooked, you wouldn't be able to stomach it. Did you ever see a play? In a theatre, I mean. I supposed not. But you'll understand when I say that the performance looks one way from where the audience sit, and quite a different way when you are behind the scenes. THERE you see that the trees and houses are cloth, and the moon is tissue paper, and the flying fairy is a middle-aged woman strung up on a rope.

That doesn't prove that the play, out in front, isn't beautiful and affecting, and all that. It only shows that everything in this world is produced by machinery--by organization. The trouble is that you've been let in on the stage, behind the scenes, so to speak, and you're so green--if you'll pardon me--that you want to sit down and cry because the trees ARE cloth, and the moon IS a lantern. And I say, don't be such a goose!"

"I see what you mean," Theron said, with an answering smile. He added, more gravely, "All the same, the Winch business seems to me--"

"Now the Winch business is my own affair," Sister Soulsby broke in abruptly. "I take all the responsibility for that. You need know nothing about it. You simply voted as you did on the merits of the case as he presented them--that's all."