Meditation, it is true, hardly threw fresh light upon the matter. It was incredible, of course, that there should be anything wrong. To even shape a thought of Alice in connection with gallantry would be wholly impossible. Nor could it be said that Gorringe, in his new capacity as a professing church-member, had disclosed any sign of ulterior motives, or of insincerity. Yet there the facts were. While Theron pondered them, their mystery, if they involved a mystery, baffled him altogether.

But when he had finished, he found himself all the same convinced that neither Alice nor Gorringe would be free to blame him for anything he might do. He had grounds for complaint against them. If he did not himself know just what these grounds were, it was certain enough that THEY knew. Very well, then, let them take the responsibility for what happened.

It was indeed awkward that at the moment, as Theron chanced to emerge temporarily from his brown-study, his eyes fell full upon the spare, well-knit form of Levi Gorringe himself, standing only a few feet away, in the staircase entrance to his law office. His lean face, browned by the summer's exposure, had a more Arabian aspect than ever. His hands were in his pockets, and he held an unlighted cigar between his teeth.

He looked the Rev. Mr. Ware over calmly, and nodded recognition.

Theron had halted instinctively. On the instant he would have given a great deal not to have stopped at all. It was stupid of him to have paused, but it would not do now to go on without words of some sort. He moved over to the door-way, and made a half-hearted pretence of looking at the photographs in one of the show-cases at its side. As Mr. Gorringe did not take his hands from his pockets, there was no occasion for any formal greeting.

"I had no idea that they took such good pictures in Octavius," Theron remarked after a minute's silence, still bending in examination of the photographs.

"They ought to; they charge New York prices," observed the lawyer, sententiously.

Theron found in the words confirmation of his feeling that Gorringe was not naturally a lavish or extravagant man. Rather was he a careful and calculating man, who spent money only for a purpose. Though the minister continued gazing at the stiff presentments of local beauties and swains, his eyes seemed to see salmon-hued hollyhocks and spotted lilies instead. Suddenly a resolve came to him. He stood erect, and faced his trustee.

"Speaking of the price of things," he said, with an effort of arrogance in his measured tone, "I have never had an opportunity before of mentioning the subject of the flowers you have so kindly furnished for my--for MY garden."

"Why mention it now?" queried Gorringe, with nonchalance. He turned his cigar about with a movement of his lips, and worked it into the corner of his mouth. He did not find it necessary to look at Theron at all.

"Because--" began Mr. Ware, and then hesitated--"because--well, it raises a question of my being under obligation, which I--"

"Oh, no, sir," said the lawyer; "put that out of your mind. You are no more under obligation to me than I am to you. Oh, no, make yourself easy about that. Neither of us owes the other anything."

"Not even good-will--I take that to be your meaning," retorted Theron, with some heat.

"The words are yours, sir," responded Gorringe, coolly. "I do not object to them."

"As you like," put in the other. "If it be so, why, then all the more reason why I should, under the circ.u.mstances--"

"Under what circ.u.mstances?" interposed the lawyer. "Let us be clear about this thing as we go along. To what circ.u.mstances do you refer?"

He had turned his eyes now, and looked Theron in the face. A slight protrusion of his lower jaw had given the cigar an upward tilt under the black mustache.

"The circ.u.mstances are that you have brought or sent to my garden a great many very expensive flower-plants and bushes and so on."

"And you object? I had not supposed that clergymen in general--and you in particular--were so sensitive. Have donation parties, then, gone out of date?"

"I understand your sneer well enough," retorted Theron, "but that can pa.s.s. The main point is, that you did me the honor to send these plants--or to smuggle them in--but never once deigned to hint to me that you had done so. No one told me. Except by mere accident, I should not have known to this day where they came from."

Mr. Gorringe twisted the cigar at another angle, with lines of grim amus.e.m.e.nt about the corner of his mouth. "I should have thought," he said with dry deliberation, "that possibly this fact might have raised in your mind the conceivable hypothesis that the plants might not be intended for you at all."

"That is precisely it, sir," said Theron. There were people pa.s.sing, and he was forced to keep his voice down. It would have been a relief, he felt, to shout. "That is it--they were not intended for me."

"Well, then, what are you talking about?" The lawyer's speech had become abrupt almost to incivility.

"I think my remarks have been perfectly clear," said the minister, with dignity. It was a new experience to be addressed in that fashion.

It occurred to him to add, "Please remember that I am not in the witness-box, to be bullied or insulted by a professional."

Gorringe studied Theron's face attentively with a cold, searching scrutiny. "You may thank your stars you're not!" he said, with significance.

What on earth could he mean? The words and the menacing tone greatly impressed Theron. Indeed, upon reflection, he found that they frightened him. The disposition to adopt a high tone with the lawyer was melting away.

"I do not see," he began, and then deliberately allowed his voice to take on an injured and plaintive inflection--"I do not see why you should adopt this tone toward me--Brother Gorringe."

The lawyer scowled, and bit sharply into the cigar, but said nothing.

"If I have unconsciously offended you in any way," Theron went on, "I beg you to tell me how. I liked you from the beginning of my pastorate here, and the thought that latterly we seemed to be drifting apart has given me much pain. But now it is still more distressing to find you actually disposed to quarrel with me. Surely, Brother Gorringe, between a pastor and a probationer who--"

"No," Gorringe broke in; "quarrel isn't the word for it. There isn't any quarrel, Mr. Ware." He stepped down from the door-stone to the sidewalk as he spoke, and stood face to face with Theron. Working-men with dinner-pails, and factory girls, were pa.s.sing close to them, and he lowered his voice to a sharp, incisive half-whisper as he added, "It wouldn't be worth any grown man's while to quarrel with so poor a creature as you are."

Theron stood confounded, with an empty stare of bewilderment on his face. It rose in his mind that the right thing to feel was rage, righteous indignation, fury; but for the life of him, he could not muster any manly anger. The character of the insult stupefied him.

"I do not know that I have anything to say to you in reply," he remarked, after what seemed to him a silence of minutes. His lips framed the words automatically, but they expressed well enough the blank vacancy of his mind. The suggestion that anybody deemed him a "poor creature" grew more astounding, incomprehensible, as it swelled in his brain.

"No, I suppose not," snapped Gorringe. "You're not the sort to stand up to men; your form is to go round the corner and take it out of somebody weaker than yourself--a defenceless woman, for instance."

"Oh--ho!" said Theron. The exclamation had uttered itself. The sound of it seemed to clarify his muddled thoughts; and as they ranged themselves in order, he began to understand. "Oh--ho!" he said again, and nodded his head in token of comprehension.

The lawyer, chewing his cigar with increased activity, glared at him.

"What do you mean?" he demanded peremptorily.

"Mean?" said the minister. "Oh, nothing that I feel called upon to explain to you."

It was pa.s.sing strange, but his self-possession had all at once returned to him. As it became more apparent that the lawyer was losing his temper, Theron found the courage to turn up the corners of his lips in show of a bitter little smile of confidence. He looked into the other's dusky face, and flaunted this smile at it in contemptuous defiance. "It is not a subject that I can discuss with propriety--at this stage," he added.

"d.a.m.n you! Are you talking about those flowers?"

"Oh, I am not talking about anything in particular," returned Theron, "not even the curious choice of language which my latest probationer seems to prefer."

"Go and strike my name off the list!" said Gorringe, with rising pa.s.sion. "I was a fool to ever have it there. To think of being a probationer of yours--my G.o.d!"

"That will be a pity--from one point of view," remarked Theron, still with the ironical smile on his lips. "You seemed to enter upon the new life with such deliberation and fixity of purpose, too! I can imagine the regrets your withdrawal will cause, in certain quarters. I only hope that it will not discourage those who accompanied you to the altar, and shared your enthusiasm at the time." He had spoken throughout with studied slowness and an insolent nicety of utterance.

"You had better go away!" broke forth Gorringe. "If you don't, I shall forget myself."

"For the first time?" asked Theron. Then, warned by the flash in the lawyer's eye, he turned on his heel and sauntered, with a painstaking a.s.sumption of a mind quite at ease, up the street.

Gorringe's own face twitched and his veins tingled as he looked after him. He spat the shapeless cigar out of his mouth into the gutter, and, drawing forth another from his pocket, clenched it between his teeth, his gaze following the tall form of the Methodist minister till it was merged in the crowd.

"Well, I'm d.a.m.ned!" he said aloud to himself.

The photographer had come down to take in his showcases for the night.

He looked up from his task at the exclamation, and grinned inquiringly.

"I've just been talking to a man," said the lawyer, "who's so much meaner than any other man I ever heard of that it takes my breath away.

He's got a wife that's as pure and good as gold, and he knows it, and she worships the ground he walks on, and he knows that too. And yet the scoundrel is around trying to sniff out some shadow of a pretext for misusing her worse than he's already done. Yes, sir; he'd be actually tickled to death if he could nose up some hint of a scandal about her--something that he could pretend to believe, and work for his own advantage to levy blackmail, or get rid of her, or whatever suited his book. I didn't think there was such an out-and-out cur on this whole footstool. I almost wish, by G.o.d, I'd thrown him into the ca.n.a.l!"

"Yes, you lawyers must run against some pretty snide specimens,"

remarked the photographer, lifting one of the cases from its sockets.