It was late in May that Jimmy Hancock wrote a note to the girl with whom he had ridden horseback in the Valley of Virginia.

"I've just had a stroke of luck," he said, "in meeting our old friend Stuart Farquaharson, who is touring the world, crowned gorgeously with bays of literary fame. I ran into him yesterday in Yokohama and from him learned for the first time of your marriage. If I am the last to congratulate you, at least I am among the first in heartiness and sincerity....

"There are some charming Americans here--though I don't think of any others whom I should mention as common acquaintances. Or did you know Mrs. Larry Holbury? She has been reigning graciously over us, and I am among the smitten. However, since both she and Stuart are to sail on the _Nippon Maru_ I have no great modicum of hope."

Poor Jimmy! Never was man less bent on purveying morsels of deleterious gossip. Never was man, in effect, more stupidly blundering.

He wrote the day after the dance on his cruiser and he spoke of the things near his current thoughts.

When Conscience had read the note, her eyes wandered thoughtfully and at the end her lips curled. "So she followed him across the world, did she?" she said half aloud, since she was quite alone. Then she added quietly: "Still I guess she didn't pursue him without knowing that she would be welcome. It was just as well that the dream ended in time."

Until his stroke had disabled the Reverend William Williams, his congregation had thought of him less as an individual than as an institution. In their minds he had shared the permanence of the church steeple. Trained through two generations to his intensity and fiery earnestness they saw in other clergymen a tame half-heartedness.

Exponents of more modern and liberal thinking had since come and gone leaving the men and women who had been reared on the thundered Word as expressed in his firstlies, secondlies, thirdlies and finalies unable to fill their pulpit to their satisfaction.

Then it was that Sam Haymond, D.D., came to them, as a visiting preacher for a single Sabbath. He came heralded by tidings of power in oratory and zeal of spirit beyond the ordinary. Report had it that his shoulders were above the heads of mediocrity and that, like Saul of Tarsus, he had entered upon his ministry, not through the easy stages of ecclesiastical apprenticeship, but with the warrior-spirit of a man wholly converted from the ranks of the scoffers. Accordingly it was appropriate that he should come as the guest of Eben Tollman, the keystone in the arch of the church's laity and of the old minister who still held power as a sort of director _emeritus_.

Eben being engaged by peremptory affairs in his study, Conscience drove to the station to meet him on a fine young Saturday morning at the beginning of June. She set out from the house which maintained a sort of lordly aloofness among pine-covered hills, more than usually conscious of the lilt of summer in air and landscape.

The Tollman farm had been one of goodly size when Eben had inherited it and outlying tracts had since augmented it by virtue of purchase and foreclosure, until the residence, which faced a lake-like cove, was almost isolated of site. On either side of the sandy road, as Conscience drove to the station, elms and silver oaks and maples were wearing new and tender shades of green. Among the sober pines they reminded her of fashionables flaunting their finery in the faces of staid conservatives.

Between the waxen profusion of bayberry bushes, wild-flowers sprinkled the carpet of pine needles and blackberry trailers crawled in a bright raggedness.

CHAPTER XVIII

Sam Haymond, D.D., gathering together his belongings, as the train whistled for the village, fancied that he could visualize with a fair accuracy the gentleman who had written, "You will be met at the station." Eben Tollman used, in his correspondence, a stilted formality which conjured up the portrait of one somewhat staid and humorless.

Conscience and her husband had, on the other hand, formed no mental portrait of the visiting minister, save that his reputation and accomplishment would indicate mature years.

When the train stopped, and only one stranger emerged upon the crushed-stone platform, Conscience thought that their guest had missed his train. Sam Haymond, D.D., in turn, seeing no elderly gentleman of sober visage, inferred that his host had failed to meet him. There was only a young woman standing alone by a baggage truck and for an instant the thoughts of the minister were fully occupied with the consideration of her arrestingly vivid beauty: a beauty of youth and slender litheness and exquisite color.

Then their glances met and the girl moved forward. It flashed simultaneously upon both of them that faulty preconceptions had caused a failure of recognition.

The tall, young man, whose breadth of shoulder and elasticity of step might have been a boy's, spoke first with an amused riffle in his eyes.

"My name is Sam Haymond. Are you, by any chance, Mr. Tollman's daughter?"

Under the challenge of his humorous twinkle, a sudden mischief flashed into Conscience's face. She was tempted to announce herself as William Williams' daughter and let it go at that, but with a swift reconsideration she laughed and told the whole truth.

"I am Mr. Tollman's wife."

The minister raised his brows in surprise. "Now I don't know why I pictured Mrs. Tollman as a delightful but maternal lady with a gift for mince pies--yet I did."

"I'm afraid I'm below par on my mince pies," she confessed with a mockery of humiliation. He could not, of course, know that the youth in her was leaping up to his bait of spontaneity as a trout leaps to the fly when flies are few. Conscience went on: "But you're below par, too--on ecclesiastical solemnity. I expected a grave-faced parson--"

Sam Haymond's laughter pealed out with a heartiness which seemed gauged to outdoor spaces rather than to confining walls.

"I haven't always been a minister," he acknowledged as he put down his suit-case. There was in his whole appearance an impression of physical confidence and fitness, which made Conscience's thoughts revert to Stuart Farquaharson.

"Once I preached a very bad sermon in a log meeting-house in the Cumberland mountains," he went on. "It is a country chiefly notable for feuds and moon-shining. I was introduced by a gentleman whose avocations were varied. He explained them to me in these words, 'I farms some; I jails some an' I gospels some.' Perhaps I'm cut to a similar pattern."

For both of them the drive proved short. Like a brook which has been running in the darkness of an underground channel, and which livens with sparkle and song as it breaks again into the sun--Conscience found herself in holiday mood and her companion was responsive and frankly delightful.

Haymond was, she understood, a preacher who could move men, but just now he was only a splendidly alive companion. If she thought of him as a preacher at all it was a preacher whose conception was rather that of a knight serving a divinely royal master than a prosecutor thinking in terms of dogma.

As an experiment in psychology, the luncheon was interesting because of the riffles and undercurrents that passed below the conversation's even tenor. The white-haired minister and his bronze-faced junior joined no issues of conflicting opinion and each saw only the admirable in the other--although two men so unlike in every quality except a common zeal might more easily have found points of disagreement than concord.

Tollman was rather the listener than the talker, but when his eyes met those of the visitor, Conscience fancied she detected an instinct of vague hostility in those of the host and a dubiousness in those of the guest. It was as if the waving antennae of their minds had touched and established a sense of antagonism.

Sam Haymond knew types as a good buyer knows his line of wares. Here, he told himself, was a nature cramped and bigoted. Such men had smirched the history of religion with inquisitions and tortures--and had retarded the progress of human thought.

Tollman's impression was less distinct. He fancied that in the penetrating quality of the other's gaze was an impertinence of prying.

Had the visiting clergyman carried his analysis far enough to discover that both men were bigots, he would still have drawn this distinction: the lion and the jackal have the same general motive in life, yet the jackal is hardly a lion.

Possibly it was a feeling of disquiet under silent observation which caused Tollman, after luncheon, to turn his guest over to his wife for entertainment, and Haymond acquiesced with enthusiasm to Conscience's suggestion that they go for a sail to the greater bay.

To Conscience this was all retrieving from monotony a little scrap of the life for which she had so eagerly yearned: the life of progress, stimulus and breadth.

And then they were in the tilting boat, racing before a wind which bellied the taut mains'l and drummed upon its canvas. She and Eben had, once or twice, taken this same sail, but he had endured in patience rather than enjoyed it.

On those occasions Ira had revealed a surly personality, which now expanded and mellowed into conversation as Haymond asked questions about the setting of eel traps and lobster pots and the management of fish weirs.

The wind toyed so persistently with Conscience's dark hair that she took it down from its coils and let it hang in heavy braids. The color rose in her cheeks and the gleam to her eyes making them starry, and a lilt sang in her voice.

There was a wealth of sapphire and purple in the water; there were thin shore lines of vivid green and dazzling sand. Sails bronzed and reddened in the sun and the distance. Gulls quarreled and screamed as they fished--and everything was young.

"Them's mackerel gulls," volunteered Ira as he pointed to two birds perched on a precariously buffeted buoy. "There's a sayin' that 'When the whippoorwills begin to call, the mackerel begins to run'--then the gulls come, too."

But as the sailboat drew near its landing stage again and the sunset was fading into twilight, the fires died slowly, too, in the eyes of Conscience Tollman and she felt that a vacation had ended.

There seemed to be in the sunlight of the following morning a tempered and Sabbath stillness.

Perhaps the sun itself remained pagan, but if so it only lent contrast to the slumberous restfulness where the shadows fell.

Over the countryside brooded the calm peacefulness of the day and when the church bell gave its first call, its notes floated out across silences disturbed by no noisier interruptions than bird notes and the distant voice of the surf.

When her father had expressed his determination of going, for the first time since he had been stricken, to the church where he had so long preached, Conscience had demurred without avail. She had been, at first, alarmed, lest the associations dwelling between those walls might excite him beyond his strength. He must feel that he was going back, broken, to a place where, in strength, he had been a mentor and potter whose clay was human thought. But he would listen to no objections and when the congregation gathered, his invalid's chair stood at the head of the center aisle and he looked directly up at the pulpit from which, since his youth, he had thundered the damnation of sinners.

When the tall young man took his place in the pulpit, the aged minister swung his finely shaped head around with something of pride as though he would say, "Here is my successor, in whom I am well pleased."

It was the revered elder who first engaged the interest of the congregation, but when Sam Haymond had announced his text: "Let him who is without sin amongst you cast the first stone," there came a shifting of attention. Here was a man gifted with that quality of voice without which there can be no oratory; endowed with that magic of force under which human emotion is a keyboard responsive to the touch; commanding that power which can sway its hearers at will between smile and tear.

His reputation was already known to them, but within five minutes after his voice sounded reputation had become a pallid label for something flamingly real: something under which their feeling stirred; something that made their pulses leap like a bugle call; something that soothed them like sleep after weariness--and above all something so convincing that questioning was stilled as by the voice of a prophet who comes direct from the presence of God.

The Reverend William Williams had held their loyalty by virtue of vehemence and fire, and in that the visitor matched and surpassed him.