Tffi WOMAN 
 
 WHO CAME 
 
 AT NIGHT 
 
 By A MINISTER 
 
Class /.- ' :'<-■ '' (--' 
 
 Book // 7^^^ fJi^ 
 
 COPYRIGHT DEPOSIT. 
 
THE WOMAN WHO CAME 
 AT NIGHT 
 
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 V 
 
 She Borrowed Money of the Minister for School 
 Books, and of His Wife for Lingerie [ Page 49 ] 
 
THE WOMAN WHO 
 CAME AT NIGHT 
 
 BEING THE EXPERIENCES 
 OF A MINISTER 
 
 THE PILGRIM PRESS 
 
 BOSTON NEW YORK CHICAGO 
 
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 hi'' 
 
 ,;,\A/4 
 
 V: 
 
 COPYRIGHT, 1914 
 BY LUTHER H. GARY 
 
 THE -PLIMPTON -PRESS 
 NORWOOD - MASS • U-S-A 
 
 OCT 30 1914 
 
 ©C/.A388l5e 
 
TO 
 
 E. R. B, 
 
ACKNOWLEDGMENT 
 
 The Publishers and Author desire to acknowledge 
 the courtesy of Miss Gertrude Lane, Editor of 
 the Woman's Home Companion, in allowing these 
 stories to be reprinted from that publication. 
 
CONTENTS 
 
 PAGE 
 
 The Woman Who Came at Night 1 
 
 The Lingerie Lady 31 
 
 The Voice of the Lord 59 
 
 The Woman Divided 87 
 
 The Shadow on the Screen 121 
 
ILLUSTRATIONS 
 
 She borrowed money of the minister for 
 school books, and of his wife for 
 Ungerie Frontispiece 
 
 She had come to me at night, hardly 
 
 knowing why she came . Facing page 16 
 
 She came to sob out her perplexity in 
 
 my study 88 
 
THE WOMAN WHO CAME 
 AT NIGHT 
 
THE WOMAN WHO CAME AT 
 NIGHT 
 
 THE FIRST IN THE SERIES OF A MINIS- 
 TER'S EXPERIENCES 
 
 SUPPOSE I have known twenty- 
 five thousand women in my nearly 
 thirty years of ministry. There 
 have been all kinds of women, as there 
 have been all kinds of men; but as I 
 look back over the years, the women 
 show up rather more favorably than 
 the men. In the long procession of 
 those who have touched my life — 
 sometimes for a mere moment, some- 
 times during the happy years of a long 
 pastorate — the number who have been 
 a disappointment, who have proved 
 unworthy of confidence or unresponsive 
 to service rendered in their behalf, 
 has been so small as to be practically 
 [3] 
 
THE WOMAN WHO CAME AT NIGHT 
 
 negligible. I should like to emphasize 
 this at the very outset. 
 
 So long as the world is as it is, he 
 who enters upon the work of the min- 
 istry must expect that more than a half 
 of his time and effort will be claimed 
 by women — at least if he serves in 
 parishes where ordinary conditions pre- 
 vail. In that respect the minister is 
 not different from the musician or the 
 actor, the lecturer or the popular author. 
 The proportion of women in church 
 congregations is not so overwhelming 
 by any means as the proportion of 
 women at concerts, at plays or among 
 the readers of new books. Women have 
 leisure for these finer things of life, as 
 their harried and driven husbands do 
 not; and in their church attendance 
 there is another influence more potent 
 even than their leisure. Spiritual in- 
 sight of the truer sort is the peculiar 
 birthright of good women; they are 
 the preservers of reverence; the trans- 
 [4] 
 
THE WOMAN WHO CAME AT NIGHT 
 
 mitters of vision to the muscled men 
 who are their sons. If the Lord when 
 he Cometh shall find faith in the world, 
 it will be due in no small measure to 
 the apostolic succession of good women, 
 who have administered its sacred rites 
 from generation to generation at the 
 altar of their homes. 
 
 No minister of the gospel could have 
 a more varied or more interesting ex- 
 perience with women than the Master 
 himself. Of the little group of followers 
 whose names have come down to us 
 linked with his — those who knew him 
 best and in whose company he was most 
 frequently — nearly half are women, 
 and women of all classes and descrip- 
 tions. There were the two kindly 
 maiden ladies, Mary and Martha, who 
 were active in all good causes, "troubled 
 with many things," in whose house and 
 with whose brother Lazarus he so often 
 found congenial company. There were 
 rich women, like the wife of the steward 
 [5] 
 
THE WOMAN WHO CAME AT NIGHT 
 
 of Herod, drawn by the wonder of his 
 new doctrine, who followed him on his 
 journeys and contributed liberally to 
 his work. There were sick women who 
 found in the splendour of his health and 
 the wonderful tonic of his joy in living 
 a new impulse to live and to grow well. 
 And there were women of the streets, 
 one of whom, at least, caught up in the 
 very moment of her sin and cast at his 
 feet for censure, looked up to see the 
 first glance of gentlemanly considera- 
 tion that had ever shone for her in the 
 eyes of any man, and was re-created 
 from that instant. If the Saviour of 
 the world found so much of his inspira- 
 tion in the companionship of good 
 women, builded so much of his hope 
 for the regeneration of mankind upon 
 them, we who are seeking to better 
 our own little portion of the world after 
 the pattern he set down are not likely 
 to progress very far by departing from 
 his example. 
 
 [6] 
 
THE WOMAN WHO CAME AT NIGHT 
 
 So I say at the outset that among 
 the twenty-five thousand women whom 
 I have known in my active ministry 
 twenty-four thousand and some hun- 
 dreds have been good women. And 
 among these I now feel sure — though 
 for years I lived in uncertainty about 
 it — that I can class The Woman Who 
 Came at Night. 
 
 The parsonage had been built in the 
 days when the city was smaller, and land 
 values low. It stood far back from the 
 street, almost completely hidden by a 
 hedge that ran along the side walk and 
 by the two splendid oaks that had been 
 planted by my earliest predecessor, the 
 first pastor of the church, seventy-five 
 years before. On Saturday nights as 
 I would sit before the open fireplace in 
 the study working on my Sunday morn- 
 ing sermons I seemed to be lifted clear 
 out of the environment of the week, so 
 completely were the disturbing sights 
 [7] 
 
THE WOMAN WHO CAME AT NIGHT 
 
 and sounds of the outside screened from 
 me. It was generally known among 
 the congregation that Saturday evenings 
 were devoted to my sermons; therefore 
 I was almost never interrupted. And 
 on this particular evening the knock at 
 the study door was doubly surprising, for 
 a heavy rain had been falling since 
 noon. 
 
 A preacher is only a made-over lay- 
 man; there is no magic in his ordina- 
 tion that extracts the temptation to 
 selfishness entirely from him. I have 
 been tempted more than once to let the 
 telephone ring unanswered, or to pre- 
 tend that I had retired when there came 
 a knock on the door, knowing that no 
 shred of light could creep through the 
 study windows to betray me. And the 
 temptation was never stronger than on 
 that rainy Saturday night. The study 
 was very comfortable and I had reached 
 an absorbing point in my writing. I 
 waited until the knock was repeated, and 
 [8] 
 
THE WOMAN WHO CAME AT NIGHT 
 
 then, because there seemed something 
 strangely anxious and appealing in it, 
 I walked over to the door and threw it 
 open. 
 
 Almost before I knew it a woman's 
 form had flashed by me into the light, 
 and a voice half spoke, half whispered 
 in my ear: 
 
 "Oh, please close it quickly!" 
 
 The voice belonged unmistakably to 
 a woman of culture and one accustomed 
 apparently to command. I shut the 
 door and turned toward her. 
 
 "You wished to see me.^" I said. 
 
 "Yes," she answered and dropped 
 into the chair before the fire. 
 
 She was of medium height and must 
 have been, I judged, between twenty- 
 five and thirty. She wore a plain black 
 coat that covered her almost completely, 
 and a veil, through which, as she turned 
 toward the light, I could see brown eyes 
 and features that were singularly at- 
 tractive. She was unmistakably ner- 
 [9] 
 
THE WOMAN WHO CAME AT NIGHT 
 
 vous, and tapped upon the arm of the 
 chair while she talked. 
 
 "May I keep my veil on. Doctor?" 
 she began. 
 
 "As you please," I answered. 
 
 "You see I am a little excited," she 
 laughed shortly. "I don't usually make 
 calls at this time of night. I was a 
 little abrupt at the door, I fear; I hope 
 you will forgive me. You see," she 
 hesitated, "you see, I thought perhaps I 
 might have been followed." 
 
 "I don't remember whether I have 
 had the pleasure — " 
 
 "No," she answered quickly. "But 
 I have heard you preach, and your son 
 Charles is in my class at school, the 
 Lincoln School — " 
 
 "Surely," I responded, trying hard to 
 remember the names of the teachers 
 who had my various boys in charge. 
 "I have heard him speak of you often. 
 Miss — " She came to my rescue. 
 
 "Miss Daniels. I live near here; and 
 [10] 
 
THE WOMAN WHO CAME AT NIGHT 
 
 you're the only minister in the city 
 whom I know. At least I felt that I 
 knew you — well enough to — " 
 
 "To talk to me like a father — or a 
 mother," I said. 
 
 "Thank you so much," she responded; 
 and there was a little catch in her voice. 
 "My mother died a long time ago, and 
 my father couldn't understand, even if 
 he wanted to. You see I'm going to 
 run away; at least I think — " 
 
 "Suppose you start at the beginning," 
 I suggested, "and tell me just what 
 happened." 
 
 She seemed relieved by the sugges- 
 tion. "Oh, I'm sure I can trust you," 
 she said. "I'm going away to be married 
 — to New York. Mr. Howard, the 
 man, — there are reasons why he can't 
 marry me in this state. He has asked 
 me to meet him in New York a week 
 from next Thursday." She stopped, a 
 little terrified by what she had said. 
 "Doesn't that shock you?" 
 [11] 
 
THE WOMAN WHO CAME AT NIGHT 
 
 "Not necessarily. But you will have 
 to begin further back — that is if you 
 really want me to help you. How long 
 have you been in the city?" 
 
 "Two years," she answered "I came 
 here from the normal school two years 
 ago. Sometimes it seems ten: if youVe 
 ever lived alone in a boarding-house 
 where you fairly hated all the other 
 boarders you know what I mean." 
 
 I nodded, and she went on, appar- 
 ently encouraged. 
 
 "I was born out in Illinois. My 
 father owns a farm out there, and is 
 fairly well to do, as farmers go. But 
 I hated farm life: it is too depressingly 
 dull. The sameness of it, the awful 
 certainty that one day is going to be 
 exactly like the others, that nothing 
 will ever happen, world without end 
 — I hated that from my earliest girl- 
 hood, or at least from the time I began 
 to read and to know something about 
 the world outside. My father thought 
 [12] 
 
THE WOMAN WHO CAME AT NIGHT 
 
 me unreasonable, and perhaps he was 
 right, from his point of view. He gave 
 me everything that he could — on a 
 farm. Once or twice a year I went to 
 the city to buy clothes, or something 
 that he couldn't find in the mail-order 
 catalogs. He couldn't understand what 
 more a girl should want than that, and 
 I long ago gave up trying to make it 
 clear to him. For ten years after my 
 mother died I kept house for him; and 
 then — I don't know whether to call it 
 a misfortune or an act of Providence — 
 he married a woman with whom I could 
 never in the world have the least bond 
 of sympathy; and I persuaded him that 
 the only possible solution was to let me 
 go away to school. I was twenty-two 
 when I went, four or five years older 
 than I ought to have been; but I had 
 the ideas and thoughts of a girl of six- 
 teen. And compared to a good many 
 girls of the city I was younger than 
 sixteen." 
 
 [13] 
 
THE WOMAN WHO CAME AT NIGHT 
 
 "You were still looking for a fairy 
 prince," I said. 
 
 She laughed a clear appealing sort of 
 a laugh which seemed to brush away 
 the evident restraint under which she 
 had been speaking. 
 
 "That almost describes it. The nor- 
 mal school opened up a new world to 
 me. For the first time in my life I 
 found real companionship and a chance 
 to read and to hear music and to iJe 
 irresponsible. It was like heaven. Then 
 I came here two years ago to teach 
 and—" 
 
 "And what?" 
 
 "It's almost worse than the farm," 
 she said resentfully. "It's lonesome; I 
 haven't any friends. Have you ever 
 been really alone in a city.^^ The coun- 
 try is friendly at least. It wraps you 
 up at night in a kindly quietness, and 
 wakes you in the morning with a soft 
 sunbeam. But the city — it just shouts 
 in your ears. I'm tired of the shouting 
 [14] 
 
THE WOMAN WHO CAME AT NIGHT 
 
 and lonesomeness." She stopped a mo- 
 ment, and then added suddenly, "Mr. 
 Howard is a theatrical man." 
 
 "You met him when he was playing 
 here.?" 
 
 "Yes." 
 
 I waited a moment for her to con- 
 tinue and as she did not speak, I took 
 up the story for her. 
 
 "He was stopping at your boarding- 
 house," I said, "or possibly he picked 
 up your bag when you dropped it in 
 the street, or brushed against you in a 
 car. He was very courteous and at- 
 tentive and you let him call. He told 
 you about the interesting life of the 
 theatre, and how happy it could be if 
 there were two to share it. But he 
 confessed that he was lonesome, that 
 the travel was monotony when one had 
 to do it alone, that he dreamed of a 
 little cottage that would be a real home. 
 Then you told him all about your lone- 
 liness, and he told you that he loved you. 
 [15] 
 
THE WOMAN WHO CAME AT NIGHT 
 
 He confessed that he had been married 
 before — and so you promised to meet 
 him in New York a week from Thursday 
 morning." 
 
 She let me finish without interruption, 
 but at the last word her face dropped 
 suddenly into her hands and her shoul- 
 ders shook, though she made no sound. 
 After a bit I stepped over to her and 
 laid my hand on her shoulder. 
 
 "Now tell me," I said, "about the 
 other man." 
 
 "Oh how did you know?" she sobbed 
 and then fitfully, little by little, she 
 finished the story. 
 
 There had been another man or rather, 
 there was. He was the only son of a 
 neighboring farmer back in Illinois, and 
 all through her girlhood his devotion 
 had never faltered. He was big and 
 muscular and had red hair (Howard's 
 hair was black and curly) and she 
 thought, as a girl, that he had no soul. 
 She liked him in a way — admired him 
 [16] 
 
She had Come to Me at Night, Hardly Knowing 
 Why She Came 
 
THE WOMAN WHO CAME AT NIGHT 
 
 even — but the thought of living for- 
 ever on his farm or any other farm was 
 too much. There had been a tearful 
 interview on the day she left for the 
 normal school, and she had not seen 
 him since. 
 
 But every Tuesday morning she re- 
 ceived a letter from him, written in his 
 big, unformed hand, and carried to 
 the post office Sunday night in order 
 that she might have it always at the 
 same hour. He never had admitted to 
 himself nor to her that there was any 
 doubt of the final outcome. He knew 
 she would come back to him. And 
 mingled with the homely gossip of the 
 farm, the birth of calves, the harvesting 
 of crops, and the simple annals of the 
 neighborhood, there were brief references 
 to the books he was reading, and his 
 progress in a correspondence course. He 
 was going to be worthy of her when she 
 came back — 
 
 So she had come to me at night. 
 
THE WOMAN WHO CAME AT NIGHT 
 
 hardly knowing why she came, but 
 driven by the necessity for telling her 
 story to somebody. Probably, she said, 
 I would think her foolish to have come 
 when she had already made up her 
 mind. For of course she had made up 
 her mind: she was going away a week 
 from Thursday; she was determined to 
 snatch for herself at last the romance 
 and thrill, and all that her little starved 
 life had wanted so long. She just 
 wouldnH go back to a farm — 
 
 When she had finished I waited. The 
 clock in the dining room struck twelve, 
 a long, slow, solemn stroke, as though 
 time had grown weary in its incessant 
 task of measuring human frailty and 
 woe. I waited until the last peal had 
 sounded, and then I started in to tell 
 her, as gently and earnestly as I could, 
 some things — many things — that her 
 mother would have told her, had she 
 lived. 
 
 I told her that life is a long road and 
 [18] 
 
THE WOMAN WHO CAME AT NIGHT 
 
 youth merely the first sunshiny ap- 
 proach to it. There are rough places in 
 the road, I told her, and marshes and 
 dry, parched, desert spots. Many 
 people fall away on the road, I said, 
 and are lost; or, more hopeless still, 
 are broken, and drag themselves there- 
 after wearily to the end. But others 
 live through the long way triumphantly. 
 And these last are they who have the 
 pearl of great price — faith in God and 
 health and — if they be women — the 
 love of righteous men. 
 
 Youth passes quickly, I told her, and 
 with it all desire and restlessness that 
 is not love; but love remains a strong, 
 vibrant, never-faltering companion on 
 the long way. I told her some things 
 which that love would and would not 
 do. One thing it could never do, I 
 said, if it w^as real and deep and lasting 
 — it could never make such a demand 
 upon her as Howard had made. 
 
 She took it all very nobly, looking 
 [19] 
 
THE WOMAN WHO CAME AT NIGHT 
 
 straight into my face, and thrusting 
 her handkerchief up now and then under- 
 neath her veil to catch a big tear that 
 furrowed slowly down her cheek. When 
 I had finished she thanked me and 
 promised that she would write Howard 
 that she could not come. 
 / "But I'll never go back to the farm," 
 she said. 
 
 "I shall pray to God for you tonight," 
 I answered; and at her request I closed 
 the door quickly behind her, for she 
 insisted that she must be allowed to 
 find her way home alone. 
 
 It was nearly one o'clock. The ser- 
 mon lay unfinished on my desk. I was 
 very tired, for one cannot give himself 
 to the problems and cares of an- 
 other without paying the price after- 
 wards in weariness of soul. That is 
 the thing — and not the preaching — 
 that wears ministers out. Yet late as 
 it was I sat down and wrote a letter 
 to the big, redheaded giant on the II- 
 [20] 
 
THE WOMAN WHO CAME AT NIGHT 
 
 linois farm, in which I told him also 
 many things. 
 
 She was not at church next morning 
 as I had thought she might be, nor at 
 the evening service either. It was not 
 until Wednesday evening that I saw 
 her. She slipped in late at the priyer 
 meeting, and lingering after the con- 
 gregation had left, asked me if she might 
 speak to me for a minute. I led her 
 into the church study. She was evi- 
 dently tired almost to the point of 
 exhaustion; there were dark rings under 
 her eyes. She did not sit down, but 
 spoke abruptly, almost before I had 
 closed the door. 
 
 "There is his answer!" she said, and 
 thrust into my hand first a telegram and 
 then a letter. The telegram read: 
 
 ** Will arrive Thursday night — be 
 
 ready. Am writing. Love, Edwin 
 
 Howard." 
 
 The letter was long and full of the 
 melodramatic language of the stage. 
 [21] 
 
THE WOMAN WHO CAME AT NIGHT 
 
 It was written on the stationery of a 
 New York theatrical club. God had 
 intended them for each other, it said; 
 nothing should ever change his deter- 
 mination nor keep them apart. He 
 could do anything, would do anything, 
 . for her; but without her his life would 
 be an empty sham. She must come 
 with him — he would have no other 
 answer. He would be at a certain spot 
 in the park on Thursday night, with a 
 carriage; she must meet him there. 
 And it ended with a picture of the 
 journeys they would take into places 
 where she had never been, and of the 
 little vine-covered cottage to which they 
 would at last turn home. It was fervid, 
 intense — too intense I thought. It 
 sounded fair: but I did not like it. 
 I started to speak but she interrupted, 
 "It's no use, Doctor; I have made 
 my decision. I came to thank you for 
 your kindness and to show you that 
 you are wrong. He's coming for me, 
 [22] 
 
THE WOMAN WHO CAME AT NIGHT 
 
 you see, and — I am going. You have 
 been very kind. I — Good night." Her 
 hand touched mine for just a moment, 
 and she was gone. 
 
 It seemed a tragic thing to me — 
 one of those heart-breaking experiences 
 in a minister's life in which, having done 
 the very most that he can, he must 
 stand by passively to see his own 
 defeat. I telegraphed the big, red- 
 haired young man in Illinois that night, 
 and wrote him. It was all I could do. 
 This was my letter, as I remember it. 
 
 "Dear David, — I call you 'David,' for 
 though I have never met you I know you 
 very well. I have lived with you in 
 spirit most of the time since I wrote you 
 last, I have thought of you in the day- 
 time and prayed for you every night — 
 and for her. She has made her decision. 
 She is going away with him next Thurs- 
 day-week night. He is to meet her with 
 a carriage in the park at the monument at 
 [23] 
 
THE WOMAN WHO CAME AT NIGHT 
 
 nine o'clock and they are to take the ten 
 o'clock train for New York, 
 
 "7 say that I know you very well. I 
 think I do. You are hig -framed, big- 
 muscled, big-hearted, and I believe you are 
 true-hearted as well. I believe you are 
 worthy of the love of a good woman, and I 
 am convinced, too, that she is good — and 
 worthy of you. It is for that reason that 
 I have cared so much and tried so hard. 
 I have done all I can. I must leave the 
 rest to you and to God. You must come 
 here on Thursday. You must see her if 
 you can. If you cannot, you must be at 
 the monument with a carriage at nine 
 o'clock on Thursday night. It is your 
 only chance. Come as quickly as you can, 
 We shall want you to be our guest while 
 you are in town. 
 
 ^'May God bless you, my boy, and her.'** 
 
 I mailed the letter that night and 
 walked slowly home, planning how I 
 might bring the two together when 
 [24] 
 
THE WOMAN WHO CAME AT NIGHT 
 
 David should arrive. And at home I 
 found one of those unforseen but un- 
 deniable messages that break in so 
 often upon the preacher's life and plans. 
 A former parishioner had died in a far 
 away city; the telegram was from his 
 wife, asking me to come at once and 
 conduct the funeral service in fulfill- 
 ment of a promise I had made him long 
 before. There was nothing to do but 
 to go at once. My wife packed our 
 bags and we left that night, not to 
 return for ten days. And in those 
 ten days David must have come, and 
 Howard — and The Woman Who Came 
 at Night gone away. I telegraphed 
 her on Wednesday a message that 
 should have reached her Thursday morn- 
 ing; urging her again to choose the 
 love that had shown itself true and could 
 be depended upon over the long road. 
 She never answered the telegram. And 
 when I returned to the city my inquiries 
 at her boarding-house brought only the 
 [25] 
 
THE WOMAN WHO CAME AT NIGHT 
 
 information that she had gone away on 
 the preceding Thursday and had left 
 no forwarding address. 
 
 The procession of those who cast 
 their burdens upon the preacher moves 
 too rapidly to allow much time for retro- 
 spect. Yesterday's people and their 
 problems have to give way before the 
 new company clamoring for attention 
 today; and as "yesterday" becomes 
 "day before yesterday" and then "a 
 week ago yesterday" and so on, those 
 who came on that day, even though 
 their problems touched us very closely, 
 are inevitably pushed back into the 
 recesses of memory, seldom to be called 
 forth again. But I could not forget The 
 Woman Who Came at Night. In the 
 years that followed I thought of her 
 very often. 
 
 What had happened on that Thursday 
 
 night .^ Had David arrived in time or 
 
 had he, perhaps, discouraged by her 
 
 seeming faithlessness, decided not to 
 
 [26] 
 
THE WOMAN WHO CAME AT NIGHT 
 
 come at all? Had she gone with Howard 
 and if so had he really meant to marry 
 her, or had her name by this time been 
 added to the long list of those who have 
 loved not wisely but too well? The 
 fact that I had heard nothing from her, 
 that she had not answered my telegram 
 nor written to thank me for my interest 
 in her behalf, led me unwillingly to this 
 conclusion. And yet I hated to give 
 her up. There was in her so much of 
 promise, her shortcomings had been so 
 clearly due to lack of wisdom and ex- 
 perience, that I found myself still cher- 
 ishing, in spite of my own judgment, 
 the faith that somehow David had 
 arrived in time and that right had won. 
 
 So for seven years The Woman Who 
 Came at Night remained a mystery. 
 Had David or Howard won her? Had 
 there been two carriages that night at 
 the monument and if so into which one 
 had she stepped? 
 
 At the end of those seven years I was 
 [27] 
 
THE WOMAN WHO CAME AT NIGHT 
 
 supplying the pulpit one Sunday at a 
 summer resort. After the service had 
 been concluded a number of people 
 stood waiting to speak to me, but they 
 passed out one by one until all had gone 
 except the gentleman who was to be 
 my host at dinner. Walking toward the 
 door with him I noticed for the first 
 time that a woman stood alone in the 
 church vestibule. She started toward us 
 and as we met near the center of the 
 church, I recognized her immediately as 
 The Woman Who Came at Night. She 
 had grown a little stouter, but there was 
 the same youthful color in her cheeks, 
 and a smile that had not been there 
 seven years before. 
 
 "This is a great pleasure," I said to 
 her. 
 
 "You must think us both very un- 
 grateful," she answered, "not to have 
 written or sent you word. I don't 
 know how to explain it. Perhaps it 
 was sensitiveness, perhaps pride. You 
 [28] 
 
THE WOMAN WHO CAME AT NIGHT 
 
 see I've tried to forget those two nights 
 — the night at your house and the other. 
 And I've pretty nearly succeeded," she 
 added with a laugh. 
 
 It was a very musical, happy laugh. 
 
 "Your husband — " I said. 
 
 "He'll be so sorry not to have met 
 you. He's more ashamed even than I 
 am that we have not written. But he's 
 a terribly laggard correspondent. And 
 once he did write you but the letter 
 came back." 
 
 I was consumed with curiosity, but 
 I hardly knew how to phrase a question. 
 
 "Shall I meet him today .f^" I finally 
 said. 
 
 "Oh, I wish you might, but he sent 
 us on a couple of weeks ahead, and he 
 won't get here until Friday. You 
 see ^ — " she laughed again — "it's our 
 first real vacation in seven years and 
 we're going to have a wonderful time of 
 it. This is our boy." 
 
 As she spoke, a manly little chap, 
 [29] 
 
THE WOMAN WHO CAME AT NIGHT 
 
 apparently about five years old, who had 
 been almost hidden between her and the 
 pew, pushed forward and stretched up 
 his chubby hand. I stopped to speak 
 to him and it seemed to me I had never 
 seen a finer, more promising lad of his 
 years anywhere. I patted him on the 
 head in the fatherly fashion that be- 
 comes instinctive with us preachers, and 
 as I did so I noticed that he had red 
 hair. 
 
 [30] 
 
n 
 
 THE LINGERIE LADY 
 
THE LINGERIE LADY 
 
 THE SECOND OF THE EXPERIENCES 
 
 'HEN, unexpectedly, we re- 
 ceived a call from our little 
 mid-western church to one 
 of the largest and best-known city 
 churches in the denomination there 
 ensued some very serious family dis- 
 cussion. My wife was the daughter of 
 an Ohio pioneer who had cleared his 
 own land and established a comfortable 
 farm home; my father had spread heal- 
 ing forty miles in either direction as a 
 country physician and was too busy 
 ever to send a bill. Twelve hundred 
 dollars a year was our salary in the little 
 village church, and on it we lived com- 
 fortably, clothed our three children and 
 were beginning to pay back something 
 [33] 
 
THE LINGERIE LADY 
 
 on my college debts. Neither of us 
 had spent any time in cities. It re- 
 quired some little faith and courage to 
 believe that we could make a place for 
 ourselves among people whose pastors 
 had been nationally famous; that we 
 could learn the ways of those that 
 dwell in apartments instead of homes, 
 and have no suppers. Among other 
 things that gave us some concern was 
 the matter of salary. Four thousand 
 dollars, the amount offered, seemed to 
 us wealth beyond all dreams. I could 
 not help thinking of the books it would 
 buy, and my wife — I am quite sure 
 — had serious misgivings as to whether 
 any minister of the gospel ought to be 
 paid so much. 
 
 That was before we reached the city. 
 In the first three months of our stay 
 there it seemed to me as if every tramp 
 and cripple, every man and woman, 
 within a hundred miles that was halt 
 or lame or blind called on us either at 
 [34] 
 
THE LINGERIE LADY 
 
 the church office or the house. Whether 
 it is a regular rule in beggardom to 
 watch the paper for new arrivals whose 
 sympathies may be played upon or 
 whether I acquired in the first days a 
 reputation for being easy which spread 
 through the ranks of the unwashed, I 
 cannot tell. But the miracle of the 
 feeding of the five thousand was pretty 
 nearly duplicated by us in those first 
 twelve weeks. We fed everybody that 
 came — and we still managed somehow 
 to pay our bills. 
 
 Among the others who sought us out 
 with ingenious tales of need I recall 
 very clearly The Lingerie Lady. She 
 was a woman whom one could not easily 
 forget — not tall but more than usually 
 attractive, with eyes that were big and 
 round and wondering like the eyes of 
 a child. No one could tell a lie who 
 had eyes like that — so you would sup- 
 pose at least — and yet I have seen that 
 same big, wondering look in the eyes of 
 [35] 
 
THE LINGERIE LADY 
 
 our youngest boy, and at the same time 
 have observed unmistakable evidence of 
 jam about the corners of his mouth. 
 
 I heard her even before I saw her. 
 The church office consisted of two rooms: 
 my assistant occupied the outer one, 
 and a door in one corner opened into 
 my private room. On this afternoon I 
 was particularly busy, and she had ap- 
 parently been speaking to him for some 
 time before the sound of their voices 
 attracted my attention. I rose and, 
 without being seen looked out to see 
 him in the very act of handing her a 
 bill. She seemed to hesitate a mo- 
 ment; then she put it in her purse. 
 
 "I don't know how to thank you," 
 she murmured, in a voice that was rich 
 and deep and undeniably cultured. 
 "You can hardly realize how much this 
 will mean to me." 
 
 As she spoke she moved toward the 
 door, my assistant following her. There 
 she turned and with all the grace of 
 [36] 
 
THE LINGERIE LADY 
 
 one to the manor born thanked him 
 again and departed. 
 
 At that moment I stepped into the 
 room. My assistant was perceptibly 
 excited, nor did I blame him greatly. 
 She was a very unusual woman — and 
 he was very young. 
 
 "Did you see that lady.^" he ques- 
 tioned. "One of the most remarkable 
 cases — pathetic really. She's a col- 
 lege graduate." 
 
 "Yes," I said. "What did she want.^" 
 
 "I felt awfully sorry for her," he 
 continued. "She's a teacher of French 
 and German. Five years ago she had 
 some money left to her — enough, she 
 thought, so that she could give up teach- 
 ing. But she invested it in oil stock 
 and last week she received word that 
 the stock is worthless." 
 
 "I saw you give her the money." 
 I interrupted. 
 
 He flushed a little. "I couldn't help 
 it. She really is a teacher. I asked 
 [37 J 
 
THE LINGERIE LADY 
 
 her some questions in French and Ger- 
 man and she answered them perfectly; 
 her accent is really fine. She's a woman 
 who isn't used to begging; you can see 
 that. All she wanted was enough to 
 buy one or two text-books: she has 
 some pupils already, and she can start 
 in with her teaching again right away. 
 I gave her ten dollars. Don't you think 
 that was right .f^" 
 
 I tried to look grave and judicial and 
 reproving. "We must be very careful 
 in such matters, Mr. Judson, I said to 
 him. "I do not doubt that the woman 
 is worthy, but it is very essential that 
 we should make the most thorough 
 investigation. 
 
 "I should have referred her to the 
 Associated Charities pending my de- 
 cision." 
 
 I disliked to administer anything that 
 
 seemed like a rebuke to the young man, 
 
 he was so very earnest and eager to do 
 
 the right thing; but in this instance it 
 
 [38] 
 
THE LINGERIE LADY 
 
 seemed to me necessary for his own good. 
 "Had she come to me" I concluded, 
 "I am quite certain I should not have 
 given her any money." 
 
 And two days later, as luck would 
 have it, she did come to me while my 
 assistant was out making some calls. 
 She drew back a little timidly when I 
 opened the door in answer to her knock. 
 
 "Oh, excuse me!" she said. "I — I 
 expected to find Mr. Judson." 
 
 "He is my assistant," I answered. 
 "He will not be back this afternoon. 
 Is there anything I can do for you.^" 
 
 "Mr. Judson has been very kind to 
 me. I wanted to thank him." 
 
 "He told me about you," I said. 
 "How is your teaching progressing.?" 
 
 Her face became suddenly clouded. 
 "It is hard," she said; "very hard. I 
 am very much out of practice. You see, 
 I thought I should never have to go 
 back to teaching. Did Mr. Judson tell 
 you-" 
 
 [39] 
 
THE LINGERIE LADY 
 
 "He told me," I said hurriedly. 
 
 She was on the verge of tears; I knew 
 the symptoms. I have gone through a 
 great many hard experiences in my 
 ministry, and have accustomed my 
 nerves to withstand assaults of various 
 kinds, but I have never learned to look 
 upon a woman's tears unmoved. 
 
 And there were pressing reasons that 
 afternoon for keeping my nerves under 
 control. I had been appointed on a 
 delegation to call upon the mayor, the 
 spokesman had been taken suddenly ill 
 and at the last moment I had been asked 
 to make the speech. It was my first 
 public appearance in the city and I 
 wanted to speak well. 
 
 She looked quite pathetic sitting there 
 at my desk, a lone woman, tossed aside 
 by the rush and greed of the city, and 
 there was no doubt that she was going 
 to cry. My heart went out to her in 
 spite of myself. She might be a fraud 
 and a deceiver — I couldn't tell. But at 
 [40] 
 
THE LINGERIE LADY 
 
 least she was a woman, and apparently 
 distressed. I gave her the five dollars 
 to purchase two lexicons which she said 
 would enable her to refresh her vocab- 
 ulary, and bade her Godspeed, suppos- 
 ing that I should never see her again. 
 
 She could not have been more than 
 twenty-seven and there was a charm 
 about her manner which was more than 
 mere beauty. I remember thinking, as 
 the door closed behind her, what a pity 
 it was that so comely a woman should be 
 left to struggle against the current of 
 life alone. 
 
 But I was late already. The dele- 
 gation was waiting for me when I ar- 
 rived, and we hurried across to the 
 mayor's office, where I made the speech, 
 which the papers next morning said was 
 a very good one. 
 
 There was to be a wedding at the 
 church that night — for thus the drama 
 of the minister's activities shifts sud- 
 denly from sorrow to rejoicing. I dined 
 [41] 
 
THE LINGERIE LADY 
 
 with the delegation down town, hurried 
 home to dress, and it was nearly mid- 
 night, after the ceremony and the re- 
 ception at the bride's home, when I 
 finally climbed out of the carriage at my 
 own door. 
 
 My wife met me in the hall-way. 
 
 "Miss Lambert was here," she said. . 
 
 "Lambert," I repeated; "Lambert." 
 
 "Why, yes; the teacher. She said 
 you asked her to come, and I took 
 care of her — " 
 
 "Oh," I said, as I recalled my visitor 
 of the afternoon. 
 
 All my suspicions were suddenly con- 
 firmed and I groaned inwardly. The 
 week had been a costly one already; 
 how much more was to be added. ^^ 
 
 "How much did she get from you.^" 
 I said. 
 
 "John" — there was reproof and sor- 
 row in my wife's tones — "You're tired, 
 dear, but you mustn't speak that way 
 about Miss Lambert, as though — as 
 [42] 
 
THE LINGERIE LADY 
 
 though she were just a common woman. 
 She's very unusual, and of course she 
 couldn't tell you what she needed the 
 money for and I was glad to help her 
 a little." 
 
 "What do you mean she couldn't tell 
 me.^" I said. "She told me that she 
 needed text-books and I gave her five 
 dollars this afternoon." 
 
 "For text-books, yes; but that wasn't 
 her real need. The poor dear was 
 simply shivering in the cold. John, 
 she simply couldn't go through the 
 winter that way without any under- 
 wear. I gave her ten dollars, and — " 
 
 "Ten and five and ten is twenty- 
 five," I said a little savagely, for I was 
 tired. "That's a pretty good week for a 
 couple of deep brown eyes and a pretty 
 voice ! How do you know she didn't have 
 any decent underwear .f^ Did you — " 
 
 "John," said my wife, "sometimes 
 you're absolutely vulgar. — Of course 
 I didn't — she told me so. I know 
 [43] 
 
THE LINGERIE LADT 
 
 she wouldn't tell an untruth — not with 
 those eyes." 
 
 "With that we went to bed; and the 
 next morning I set down twenty-five 
 dollars in the book wherein is recorded 
 treasure which may be laid up in heaven 
 but will certainly never be repaid on 
 earth. If one is not a good loser he has 
 no business in the ministry. 
 
 But if I forgot Miss Lambert, she ap- 
 parently had no intention of forgetting 
 me. I stepped down from the pulpit 
 at the close of the service the next 
 Sunday morning to find a fine-faced 
 old man waiting to speak to me. 
 
 " I am Mr. Mason," he said. "I merely 
 wanted to tell you that I provided for 
 Miss Lambert and was very glad to be 
 of service — very glad indeed. A very 
 remarkable young lady, sir; I wish you 
 would tell me about her." 
 
 "But I don't know anything about 
 her," I protested. "I never saw her but 
 once in my life." 
 
 [44] 
 
THE -LINGERIE LADY 
 
 "What?" flamed the old gentleman. 
 "You mean to say you did not send her 
 to me?" 
 
 "By no means" I said. "Was it 
 text-books or underwear?" 
 
 He returned my look guiltily. 
 "Underwear," he said. "She said that 
 you sent her to me. I was very busy 
 in the office, and should not have seen 
 her except for your name. But when 
 she came in, I was so impressed with 
 her, that I departed from my invar- 
 iable rule in such matters and gave her 
 ten dollars. She doesn't seem like a 
 woman who would lie — " 
 
 "No," I said emphatically, "she 
 doesn't!" 
 
 "And it was so apparently distasteful 
 to her to ask," he continued. "Mani- 
 festly a lady does not like to speak of 
 such things — " 
 
 "I am sorry to say it," I replied, 
 "but I am afraid Miss Lambert does like 
 to speak of such things. That is the 
 [45] 
 
THE LINGERIE LADY 
 
 second suit of underwear for which she 
 has secured money this week to my 
 knowledge." 
 
 "Impossible!" said the old man and 
 I was sorry for him. 
 
 It's a distressing thing to see poison 
 poured into the sweet spring of ^charity. 
 A long time would elapse before he 
 would yield to another request for aid, 
 however worthy, and I knew it. 
 
 "I am glad you warned me, sir," he 
 said, stiffly. "I shall be more careful 
 in the future." 
 
 In the next two weeks I was called 
 on the telephone or written to or dis- 
 turbed by personal visits no less than a 
 dozen times by people who had been 
 approached by Miss Lambert. In all 
 cases they were distinctly pleased with 
 themselves, glad to have been of ser- 
 vice to a friend of mine, and such a 
 delightful friend! They would be glad 
 to hear more about her, and to be al- 
 lowed to help again if I thought it nec- 
 [46] 
 
THE LINGERIE LADY 
 
 essary. It was very distressing that 
 so attractive and cultivated a woman 
 should be compelled to seek aid — and 
 in a matter of such delicacy — and so 
 forth. Thus the conversation started, 
 and generally it ended by an aggrieved 
 and insulted individual's stamping out 
 of my study, convinced that in some way 
 I had been responsible for the perpetra- 
 tion of a fraud upon him. 
 
 The climax came at the regular Mon- 
 day morning meeting of the ministers 
 of our denomination. Dawson of the 
 Third Church came up to tell me how 
 glad he was to have been of help to 
 Miss Lambert in her difficulty, when 
 Thornton of Pacific Avenue Church over- 
 heard him. 
 
 "Did she go to you, too.'*" he de- 
 manded of Dawson, and his big laugh 
 rang out boisterously. "Why she 
 caught Smith of Park Avenue, and 
 Edmunds. They contributed a set of 
 lingerie each and goodness knows 
 [47] 
 
THE LINGERIE LADY 
 
 how many others have done the same 
 thing. 
 
 "Gentlemen!'* he shouted, and 
 pounded on a table. "Will all the 
 brethren who have been visited by 
 Miss Lambert, a friend of our Brother 
 — Jones (naming me) please hold up 
 their right hands." 
 
 A dozen hands went up, some of 
 them belonging to the leading pastors 
 of the city. I blushed to the roots of 
 my hair, and attempted to be heard, but 
 Thornton's big voice made it impos- 
 sible. 
 
 "I am authorized to say for Brother 
 Jones that all of you — you members of 
 the Lambert Lingerie Club — will lunch 
 today at the Pritchard House at his 
 expense." 
 
 A roar of applause greeted the an- 
 nouncement. For a rough and tumble, 
 rowdy lot — get them off by them- 
 selves — nothing can equal a crowd of 
 preachers; and when it comes to eating! 
 [48] 
 
THE LINGERIE LADY 
 
 — That luncheon, I believe, cost me 
 something like eleven dollars. I entered 
 that also on the Lambert account, and 
 that week, to my intense relief, the 
 police, to whom I had reported her case, 
 informed me that she had left the city. 
 
 There were others in the city far 
 better known than I, men whose names 
 could command an entree almost any- 
 where in the country. These continued 
 to hear of Miss Lambert as she pro- 
 gressed on her travels. Friends of theirs 
 in other cities, or other pastors in our 
 denomination would write to say that 
 Miss Lambert had called upon them, 
 and that they had been glad to provide 
 for her necessities. Sometimes it was 
 text-books that she wanted, sometimes 
 underwear, her requests depending gen- 
 erally upon the season. Text-books in 
 summer; underwear in winter; under- 
 wear in the north, and text-books in 
 the milder south. Altogether she must 
 have travelled thousands of miles in 
 [49] 
 
THE LINGERIE LADY 
 
 the next two years, using the same 
 stories with which she had first prevailed 
 upon us. But apparently she had for- 
 gotten my name, at least no one ever 
 wrote to me about her. 
 
 And then suddenly I returned to my 
 office after a summer vacation to find 
 the desk piled high with mail. x4Lmong 
 the letters was this: 
 
 " Dear Dr. Jones, — It is seldom that 
 I have an opportunity to do a kindness 
 which afforded me so much pleasure as 
 my little experience with your friend Miss 
 Lambert to-day. She is, of course, a 
 stranger in the city, and I was greatly 
 touched hy her need. May I add also 
 that she appealed to me as an exceedingly 
 cultured and charming woman, one of 
 the most charming whom I have ever met. 
 You may not recall me, but I was for- 
 merly an occasional attendant at your 
 church, and two years ago you conducted 
 my dear wife's funeral. 
 [50] 
 
THE LINGERIE LADY 
 
 "Can you tell me anything more about 
 Miss Lambert?'^ 
 
 Could I? As I sat there with that 
 letter before me, all the trials and trib- 
 ulations and wretchedness of spirit which 
 had come to me as the gift of Miss 
 Lambert paraded one after another be- 
 fore my mind. My spirit of charity was 
 at rather low ebb, anyway — whose is 
 not when he has just been haled out of 
 the woods to face another year's hard 
 work? — and before I had finished that 
 rather bitter review I was in the right 
 mood to dictate a very unministerial 
 letter. Fortunately my stenographer 
 was a little late in arriving that morning, 
 and before she put in appearance I had 
 calmed myself to this point: 
 
 "My dear Mr. Rogers, — I regret to 
 note by the postmark how long a time your 
 letter has awaited my return from the 
 country. It must have arrived soon after 
 [51] 
 
THE LINGERIE LADY 
 
 I left for my vacation. I trust you will 
 "pardon this delay, therefore, 
 
 "/ remember you very pleasantly, and 
 shall hope to see you when you are in the 
 city again. I regret that I cannot ex- 
 press the same sentiment in regard to 
 Miss Lambert. My experience with her 
 and that of my friends, has been exceed- 
 ingly unfortunate. To be perfectly frank 
 with you. Miss Lambert, is not an honest 
 woman. She is a college graduate, tal- 
 ented, and as you say, exceedingly attrac- 
 tive. Her offending is therefore more 
 grievous, because she might so easily make 
 a good living and an honest living. I 
 know of few women better equipped to do 
 so. Yet she has formed this fatal habit 
 of deceit which has been so long with her 
 as to become almost a disease. She would 
 rather steal than work. 
 
 " I do not say that she is hopeless: the 
 
 Scriptures, I believe, record the case of 
 
 one woman, similarly attractive, out of 
 
 whom were cast seven devils. Miss Lam- 
 
 [52] 
 
THE LINGERIE LADY 
 
 bert might be rehabilitated in like manner. 
 But I am compelled to say that unless she 
 has changed greatly since my last experi- 
 ence with her your safest course will be 
 to hand her over to the police,^' 
 
 The mail was very heavy that day, 
 and there were a number of visitors. 
 When I went to the church the next 
 morning a carriage stood in front of my 
 office door, and as I entered the office 
 a man rose and spoke to me. He 
 was clean-shaven, well-dressed, and 
 apparently about thirty-five years of 
 age. 
 
 "I am Mr. Rogers," he said. 
 
 "I remember you very well," I 
 answered, I have just come back from 
 my vacation, and found your letter only 
 yesterday morning." 
 
 **It is about that I want to speak to 
 you. Rather I want to thank you. 
 You have been of very great service 
 to me. Doctor." 
 
 [53] 
 
THE LINGERIE LADY 
 
 "Oh don't mention it Mr. Rogers, 
 it was jiothing, really — " 
 
 "Pardon me, Doctor; it was every- 
 thing. It was the mention of your name 
 that first caused me to see Miss Lam- 
 bert. I was very busy that morning; 
 I perhaps should have allowed my assis- 
 tant to turn her away but for that — " 
 
 A terrible intimation of what was to 
 come crept over me: 
 
 "You got my letter.^" I faltered. 
 
 "No, no letter. When you did not 
 reply I came to the conclusion that you 
 must be on your vacation. But by that 
 time I really needed no information 
 from you about Miss Lambert. I had 
 discovered for myself more than you 
 could ever tell me — that she is the 
 sweetest and purest and finest little 
 woman in the world." 
 
 "You mean—" 
 
 "That we were married a week ago 
 yesterday. I should have been glad to 
 have had you perform the ceremony, 
 [54] 
 
THE LINGERIE LADY 
 
 but Miss Lambert — or, rather Mrs. 
 Rogers — loves the country. No city 
 church nor city minister, she said — 
 just some quiet stone church away in 
 the country — " 
 
 I did my very best to look happy; 
 I murmured some conventional congrat- 
 ulation and wrung his hand. But the 
 dreadful horror of that letter was upon 
 me: the thought of it stalking him about 
 on his honeymoon, being forwarded after 
 him from place to place, and finally 
 leaping upon him in the first hour of 
 their home life together made me fairly 
 sick. I could hardly wait for him to 
 go; it seemed as though he would linger 
 on forever shaking my hand and thank- 
 ing me for his happiness. At last the 
 door shut, and in the same instant I 
 landed in the outer oflace beside the desk 
 of my stenographer. 
 
 "Miss Emerson, please put on your 
 hat and go to the post office at once. 
 It is very important. See the post- 
 [55] 
 
THE LINGERIE LADY 
 
 master personally; no one else will do. 
 That letter to Mr. Rogers — it must 
 not be delivered; ask him as a special 
 favor to hold it until I can call and 
 explain — " 
 
 "But I haven't mailed it yet, Doctor." 
 
 "What?" I stammered. "Are you 
 sure.^" 
 
 "Yes. There were so many letters 
 yesterday that I didn't get to it. I 
 just signed it, a few minutes ago." 
 
 I sank into the nearest chair, pretty 
 nearly exhausted. "Give it to me!" 
 I said — "and the carbon, too." And 
 with my own hands I tore both into a 
 hundred fragments and threw them into 
 the wastebasket. 
 
 I have never seen The Lingerie Lady 
 since; and it may be that no one in 
 the world but me knows that she and 
 the respected wife of a leading citizen in 
 one of our suburbs are the same woman. 
 But I know. And should her husband 
 die it would not surprise me to find her 
 [56] 
 
THE LINGERIE LADY 
 
 again some morning at my study door 
 waiting to tell me that his estate had 
 proved valueless, that she must return 
 to teaching, and that she would appre- 
 ciate the loan of a few dollars — for 
 text-books, if it should happen to be 
 summer; for suitable underwear if she 
 should come in winter. The love of the 
 game was deeply embedded in her soul. 
 And in all the world I have never met 
 any woman so equipped to play it well 
 — by her manner, her voice and — her 
 eyes. 
 
 [57] 
 
Ill 
 
 THE VOICE OF THE 
 LORD 
 
THE VOICE OF THE LORD 
 
 THE THIRD OF THE EXPERIENCES 
 
 F I did not think that some good 
 brother had already done so I should 
 -^ write an article some day called 
 "The Minister's Mail." But I am quite 
 certain that it has already been done; 
 I have an indistinct recollection of 
 having read the article myself and of 
 laughing at this letter, which was quoted 
 as having arrived in one morning's 
 mail: 
 
 "Dear Sir, — I shall he at church 
 next Sunday morning and will put one 
 dollar in the contribution box if you will 
 preach from this text, 'And he took him 
 by the tail!''' 
 
 [61] 
 
THE VOICE OF THE LORD 
 
 Almost any minister could write a 
 similar article, and it would be very 
 rich in humor and in pathos — and in 
 emotions of various sorts, a tangled bit 
 of grand opera mingling notes from many 
 discordant heart strings. There would 
 be requests for aid and confessions of 
 doubt; pleas for advice in love affairs 
 and domestic tribulation; an occasional 
 word of commendation and letters of 
 criticism, more than occasional, with 
 now and then a fragment of denuncia- 
 tion or threat. There are a hundred 
 letters in my collection, any one of 
 which, followed up, would have led 
 into the heart of an adventure. And 
 some of them were followed up. 
 
 "I wonder who that is from," my 
 wife said, as she laid the mail on 
 the breakfast table one morning. It 
 was a lavender letter of rich, fine 
 material, addressed in a woman's hand- 
 writing. 
 
 "We'll see," I answered, and opened 
 [62] 
 
THE VOICE OF THE LORD 
 
 it. There was neither address, nor date 
 line nor signature. It read simply: 
 
 " Tomorrow at eight I shall he there. 
 Be ye ready." 
 
 "Who is that from," said my wife 
 again, this time with a little added 
 emphasis, for even a minister's wife is 
 human and a woman. 
 
 "You know as much about it as I 
 do, my dear. I never saw the hand- 
 writing before. Are we to be home 
 tomorrow at eight .f^" 
 
 "You have to go to that reception 
 later in the evening." 
 
 "That's all right," I answered. 
 "She'll be here before I have to leave. 
 And we'll see — if she's good looking 
 maybe I'll take her along." 
 
 "That's a good idea" said my wife, 
 and laughed. But I noticed she kept 
 the letter. 
 
 I was hard at work in the study the 
 next morning when the maid brought in 
 a card and laid it on my desk. The 
 [63] 
 
THE VOICE OF THE LORD 
 
 first name and middle initial meant 
 nothing to me; but the surname is one 
 that has an honored place in *our lit- 
 erature. In one corner was inscribed, 
 in the handwriting of the letter, "The 
 Voice of the Lord." 
 
 "Show her in,'* I said; and a mo- 
 ment later she entered, a woman, tall 
 and with a certain dignity of face and 
 manner. She advanced to the middle of 
 the room and stood silent, her eyes 
 fixed on my face, until the maid's foot- 
 steps had pattered off down the hall 
 and she knew that we were entirely 
 alone. 
 
 In the interval I had plenty of time to 
 study her features. Her hair was grey, 
 though she couldn't have been more 
 than thirty-seven or eight: her fore- 
 head was high and fine, her cheeks a 
 trifle drawn; and her chin, though well 
 formed, bore just a suggestion of in- 
 stability. But it was her eyes that 
 told the story. There was the weird, 
 [64] 
 
THE VOICE OF THE LORD 
 
 unwholesome gleam in them that can 
 be kindled by intoxicants or by un- 
 bridled emotion, or that may be the 
 signal of a mind undone. She had 
 poured oil of some unholy sort into her 
 life's fire; it flamed fitfully and lurid 
 through the windows of her soul. 
 
 "I am here," she announced. Her 
 voice was full and deep, as though much 
 employed in public speaking. 
 
 "You have me somewhat at a dis- 
 advantage," I began. 
 
 But she had evidently marked out 
 the channel in which the conversation 
 was to be conducted, and she would 
 not be tempted from it. 
 
 "You know me, though you may not 
 admit it. You have heard of my grand- 
 father," — and she spoke a name much 
 honored in our literature. "I write, 
 also," she continued. "You have seen 
 my articles in the magazines." 
 
 Being thus reminded, I did recall 
 [65] 
 
THE VOICE OF THE LORD 
 
 having seen her name once or twice in 
 some of the lesser periodicals, and said 
 so. She seemed pleased. 
 
 "I am a great writer," she said. 
 
 I smiled a little, and she was quick 
 to notice it. 
 
 "You laugh, but I tell you I could 
 be famous — more famous than my 
 grandfather. I know it — I know the 
 power that is in me. But I have aban- 
 doned writing; I have said *Get thee 
 behind me!' I cannot write and be 
 true to my mission." 
 
 **Your mission?" I questioned. 
 "What is your mission .f^" 
 
 "The Lord has commanded me to 
 restore prophecy upon the earth. As 
 Nathan appeared before David, as John 
 the Baptist appeared before Herod, so 
 I appear before the powerful of the 
 earth. I am The Voice of the Lord; 
 I appear before you. I say: 'Thus 
 saith the Lord. Thou art untrue to 
 [66] 
 
THE VOICE OF THE LORD 
 
 thy trust. Why is thy preaching not 
 my preaching? Why hast thou proved 
 unfaithful to the truth?'" 
 
 By this time I knew that I had to deal 
 with one of the religious cranks who 
 are part of the minister's problem. 
 Nearly every week some one of them 
 comes to urge his right to be heard at 
 the Sunday morning service or to pre- 
 sent some obscure passage of Scripture 
 as containing a new revelation too long 
 neglected. 
 
 "I have no doubt the Lord speaks to 
 you," I said. **But he speaks to me 
 also and to every one of his children. 
 I, too, am commissioned to proclaim his 
 gospel on the earth: I must speak his 
 message as I understand it. I am glad 
 to have met you." 
 
 But she would not be turned aside. 
 
 "You say you are a true minister," 
 
 she said, her voice rising into sharp, 
 
 bitter scorn. "Show me proof of your 
 
 ministry. Your Master healed the sick; 
 
 [67] 
 
THE VOICE OF THE LORD 
 
 do you heal? He said, 'These signs 
 shall follow them that believe: they 
 shall cast out devils: they shall lay 
 hands on the sick and they shall recover/ 
 Show signs: The Voice of the Lord 
 says to you, *Show signs.'" 
 
 "I will show signs of my ministry 
 when you show signs of yours," I re- 
 plied. 
 
 "What do you mean?" 
 
 Her voice was more shrill; she was 
 working herself fast toward hysteria 
 and I was eager to have her gone. As 
 I answered I stepped over to the door 
 and opened it 
 
 "Why don't you quote the whole 
 of the Lord's promise?" I demanded. 
 "This sign too, he says, shall follow 
 them that believe: *if they drink any 
 deadly thing it shall not hurt them.' 
 There is a drug store across the street. 
 Come: we will go over. You believe 
 that if you drink any deadly thing it 
 will not hurt you, don't you?" 
 [68] 
 
THE VOICE OF THE LORD 
 
 She opened her mouth as though to 
 reply, and then with a savage glance 
 brushed by me to the front door. There 
 she turned for an instant: 
 
 "Hypocrite! Blasphemer!" she fairly 
 shrieked. "I leave you; but you shall 
 yet hear The Voice of the Lord. You 
 shall hear me. You shall obey — " 
 and so, turning every dozen steps to 
 hurl her threats back at me, she made 
 her way down to the street. Our house 
 stood a long way back and as she 
 reached the sidewalk she raised her 
 right arm above her head and shouted 
 to me: "The Lord will proclaim me 
 before the city. He will make the 
 people acknowledge me; he will make 
 
 you." 
 
 "When he does," I thought, "it will 
 be a much colder day than it is now." 
 And noting with gratitude that the 
 street was deserted and our little scene 
 apparently unobserved I shut the door 
 and went back to work. 
 [69] 
 
THE VOICE OF THE LORD 
 
 The next morning there was another 
 lavender letter in the mail. 
 
 "You cast me out last night," it said, 
 "even as the priests cast out the proph- 
 ets of old. But The Voice of the, Lord 
 will be heard. The Lord will reveal me 
 to the city, and you shall be the instru- 
 ment of that revelation." 
 
 "A strange case," I said, and tossed 
 the letter over to my wife. "She might 
 have been a brilliant woman — writes 
 well and all that — and she's sure the 
 Lord is on her side. And I am to be 
 *the instrument of the revelation,' 
 whatever that means." 
 
 "Whatever it means," said my wife, 
 "I think you better have me around the 
 next time any prophetesses come to 
 call." 
 
 "You can't make me feel bad that 
 way," I replied. "Take her, my dear; 
 she is yours. I'm going to write her and 
 say, *Dear Madam: Please address 
 all future communications to my wife.'" 
 [70] 
 
THE VOICE OF THE LORD 
 
 "You needn't write her at all," said 
 the dearest woman in the world. "Let 
 her alone; you'll probably never hear 
 of her again." 
 
 But for once the dearest woman was 
 wrong. The letters kept coming for 
 some weeks — one every morning — 
 each reaffirming her divine commission 
 and warning me that some day I should 
 be the means of establishing her claim 
 before the world. She became a fa- 
 miliar institution in our household. "The 
 Voice of the Lord," the children called 
 her; and when her letters ceased coming, 
 as they did after a month or so, we 
 rather missed them. 
 
 I had found out something about her 
 in the meantime. Edgerton of the Third 
 Church told me. He was probably the 
 best known minister in the city, a fine 
 elderly man of national reputation. 
 
 "She came to see me several years 
 ago," he said. "It was after a big 
 missionary convention here, and one of 
 [71] 
 
THE VOICE OF THE LORD 
 
 our women had read a really remark- 
 able paper. I forget the subject now, 
 but it was the talk of the convention, 
 and the newspapers commented upon 
 it. The next morning your friend called 
 on me and introduced herself. 
 
 "'Did you hear that paper by Mrs. 
 Blank yesterday.^' she asked. 
 
 "I told her I had and thought it was 
 fine. 
 
 "*I wrote it' she said. 'I write most 
 of the papers for these wealthy women 
 that have more money than brains.' 
 
 "I was amazed and somewhat dis- 
 gusted. 
 
 "*What you say may be true,' I told 
 her, *but if it is the betrayal of their 
 confidence does not commend you to 
 mine.' 
 
 "Then she told me a good deal about 
 herself. She is brilliant and of good 
 family. But her people have long since 
 cast her ojff. You see, she is an opium 
 fiend." 
 
 [72] 
 
THE VOICE OF THE LORD 
 
 After the letters ceased coming I lost 
 sight of The Voice of the Lord and she 
 dropped finally out of memory. Once, 
 indeed, I saw an article in one of the 
 magazines signed by her name; it was 
 a rather bitter attack upon the churches 
 because of their indifference to the 
 appeals of those in want. Once I heard 
 that she had been arrested in a distant 
 city for interrupting religious meetings, 
 and the papers devoted some little space 
 to a half -crazed interview which she had 
 given and signed by a weird pseudonym, 
 which she called her prophetic name. 
 But I paid little attention to it. 
 
 Almost a year later, in passing a little 
 church a couple of blocks from my own 
 I was attracted by the sound of singing 
 inside. The church had been vacant 
 for some months, the congregation hav- 
 ing moved further up town, away from 
 it; and it had been offered, I knew, 
 for sale. I was on my way to my own 
 service and was too busy to stop; but 
 [73] 
 
THE VOICE OF THE LORD 
 
 later I inquired of our janitor, who was 
 my source of information on any matter 
 connected with the neighborhood. 
 
 "What's going on in the httle church, 
 Pete?" I asked him. 
 
 "Some woman's started a rehgion 
 there," he answered. "Jehovasha, she 
 calls herself, or something like that; 
 and say, Doctor, she's got 'em goin', 
 too." 
 
 "What do you mean, 'got 'em goin'?'' 
 
 "It's crowded every Sunday. They 
 claim she's got some power to do mir- 
 acles." He looked at me quizzically. 
 "Say, Doctor, you don't think there is 
 any miracles these days now do you?" 
 
 "I don't see why there can't be, 
 Pete. The Lord hasn't lost any of his 
 power. Tell me more about Jehovasha 
 — is that the name?" 
 
 "That's what she calls herself, sir, 
 
 but I'm thinkin' that it's a fake name. 
 
 Like as not she's a married woman or 
 
 got somethin' else crooked in her past. 
 
 [74] 
 
THE VOICE OF THE LORD 
 
 No one knows where she comes from or 
 who she is. Least I ain't found none 
 that does. We was diseussin' it the 
 other night over at O'Keefe's — beg 
 pardon, sir, over at the Y. M. C. A., 
 sir — and someone said as how she just 
 dropped down here one Sunday and 
 began preachin' on the street, sayin' 
 that she was the true preacher and all 
 other preachers was fakes and she'd 
 show 'em up, and come unto her all 
 that was sore at the churches: and if 
 anybody was sick, come along too 
 because the doctors was fakes also 
 and devils. She would cure 'em and 
 nothing charged, only glorify the Lord 
 and each one chip in whatever he 
 wanted. And while she was preachin' 
 someone came up with a crutch, and 
 says: 'I'm lame and the doctors can't 
 do nothin' and if you got the goods the 
 way you say, why cure me, and if you 
 don't cure me why you're a fake.' 
 "She sort o' looked at him queer 
 [75] 
 
THE VOICE OF THE LORD 
 
 and her eyes was flashin' and she 
 says: — 
 
 ***God has sent you as a proof for 
 the wicked. In the name of the Al- 
 mighty chuck that crutch!' 
 
 **I wasn't there myself, but O'Keefe 
 swears he seen it. The feller sort of 
 straightened up and shouts: 
 
 ***I'm cured; glory to God!' 
 
 "Then he chucks the crutch, and 
 everybody shouts and begins to throw 
 quarters and nickels at Jehovasha, and 
 the kids run in to get the money, and 
 they was a fight. But next Sunday she 
 started goin' in the little church, and 
 they's been a crowd there ever since." 
 
 The next morning I opened the paper 
 
 to find a story about Jehovasha on the 
 
 front page and a flash-light photograph 
 
 of the inside of her church, crowded 
 
 with worshippers. She herself was 
 
 shown as merely a little blue haziness 
 
 behind the pulpit. The story was one 
 
 of those overdrawn, sensational tales 
 [76] 
 
THE VOICE OF THE LORD 
 
 which find their way to the front page 
 on Monday mornings, when there is 
 no news in the world. It told of "Je- 
 hovasha's" sudden appearance in the 
 city and of her first ** Miracle," which 
 Pete had described though this ac- 
 count was not so picturesque, on the 
 whole, as his. No one knew her origin, 
 it said, nor her true name. To all 
 inquiries she replied merely that she 
 was Jehovasha, the prophetess of the 
 Lord, and that she had been sent to 
 restore true religion to the city and to 
 call the ministers and the churches to 
 repentance. 
 
 After that there was something in 
 the papers about her on almost every 
 Monday morning. One Sunday she had 
 held a special meeting for cripples and 
 after a half-crazed exhortation, which 
 had brought the whole congregation to 
 a pitch of near insanity, she had shouted 
 that the spirit of the Lord was de- 
 scending upon them in healing power, 
 [77] 
 
THE VOICE OF THE LORD 
 
 and that whoever would lift up his 
 arms and glorify Jehovah would be 
 healed. An indescribable pandemonium 
 had ensued. Men had shouted and 
 women had cried; crutches had been 
 thrown towards the platform, and some 
 who had not walked unaided for years, 
 hypnotized by the excitement of the 
 occasion and raised into veritable frenzy, 
 had danced up and down in the aisles. 
 It was such a scene as one may witness 
 at the older shrine; such scenes as I 
 have beheld in Dowie's Tabernacle and 
 in a dozen other places. The next morn- 
 ing her "twelve apostles," as she termed 
 a dozen of her followers, were busy 
 nailing crutches and braces of various 
 sorts to the walls of the church. After 
 that her little tabernacle became too 
 small for the crowds that sought admit- 
 tance. They overflowed into the street, 
 and sometimes she stood in a window 
 and hurled her piercing sentences down 
 among them. 
 
 [78] 
 
THE VOICE OF THE LORD 
 
 She had a pecuHarly alert sense of 
 news value. There was always some- 
 thing in her sermons that the papers 
 could seize upon and for several months 
 she was a regular help in the time of 
 their Monday-edition trouble. She was 
 bitter against the doctors and the 
 preachers; and as time went on her ex- 
 coriations became rather galling to some 
 of the more sensitive brethren of the 
 city. Two of them who had been most 
 severely handled by her at length pre- 
 vailed upon the police to have her 
 locked up as a public nuisance and dis- 
 turber of the peace. 
 
 I heard about it Sunday night from 
 Pete, and it seemed to me a most un- 
 fortunate action. Whatever her vaga- 
 ries, or those of any other speaker, I 
 have never relished the idea of police 
 interference in the matter of free speech. 
 Moreover, there was no surer way to 
 give form and substance to her move- 
 ment than by awarding her the crown 
 [79] 
 
THE VOICE OF THE LORD 
 
 of the martyr. All her charges against 
 the churches would gain redoubled power 
 with the unthinking in the light of this 
 apparent attempt to quiet her by per- 
 secution. 
 
 It was in this frame of mind that I 
 went home Sunday night. Monday 
 morning I picked up the paper to find 
 her name as usual on the front page, 
 and — to my surprise and consterna- 
 tion — my own linked with it. 
 
 From the old, yellowed newspaper 
 clipping before me as I write I copy 
 the headlines: 
 
 JEHOVASHA ARRESTED 
 
 SPECTACULAR PROPHETESS JAILED 
 
 FOR DISTURBING PEACE 
 
 SAYS THE LORD WILL SEND DR. JONES 
 
 AND DR. EDGERTON TO DELIVER HER 
 
 PRAYS AND SINGS IN CELL, AND 
 
 PROMISES TO BE DELIVERED THIS 
 
 MORNING 
 
 [80] 
 
 \ 
 
THE VOICE OF THE LORD 
 
 The reporters were at the telephone 
 before I had finished my breakfast. I 
 put them off with evasive answers and 
 got Edgerton on the wire. 
 
 "What do you think about it?" I 
 said. 
 
 "It's a shame she was ever locked 
 up," he replied. "The woman's a drug 
 fiend and probably insane, but she's 
 harmless." 
 
 "Just what I think; but what are we 
 going to do?" 
 
 He hesitated a moment and then his 
 great laugh rang out heartily. "I don't 
 see how we can let the Lord fall down 
 on his promises," he said. "I'll meet you 
 at the police station in half an hour." 
 
 So we two delivered her as she had 
 announced that we should. The warden 
 brought her out into his own office. As 
 she stepped through the door, there was 
 something familiar in her features — in 
 her proud carriage and the uncanny 
 gleam in her eye. I recognized her sud- 
 [81] 
 
THE VOICE OF THE LORD 
 
 denly as the Voice of The Lord, the 
 woman who for a month had written 
 me daily letters. She was older and 
 worn, and the finger of death had placed 
 its mark upon her brow. In the drawn, 
 discolored corners of her mouth, and the 
 sunken places about her eyes there were 
 the unmistakable signs that the drug 
 had almost finished its evil work. But 
 her spirit was apparently unbroken. 
 
 We talked with her a long time, 
 Edgerton and I. We told her that we 
 had come to deliver her because we be- 
 lieved she had been mistreated, but 
 that we could not agree to go on her 
 bond unless she was willing to leave the 
 city and return to her relatives. At 
 first she refused but when we made as 
 though to go away, she broke down and 
 throwing herself upon us, pled with us 
 not to leave her in jail. So we arranged 
 for her bail and adjusted matters with 
 the police officers, the district attorney 
 and the two brethren, who were willing 
 [82] 
 
THE VOICE OF THE LORD 
 
 to forget the charge they had preferred. 
 Edgerton agreed to see her to a train 
 and to telegraph her people in the city, 
 where her name is and always has been 
 an honored one. 
 
 She had stopped crying and while 
 we were busy with the telephone, and 
 the legal papers, her eyes followed me 
 from place to place, a strange look in 
 them that seemed, in spite of her fear, 
 something almost approaching a smile. 
 Finally she spoke: 
 
 "I won, didn't I, Doctor?" 
 
 "What do you mean?" I asked. 
 
 "I told you the Lord would glorify 
 me and that you would be the instru- 
 ment of my glory. You are, aren't you? 
 A week from now I'll be forgotten 
 around here, I suppose. But tomorrow" 
 — she gave a little fitful chuckle — "to- 
 morrow the papers will say that my 
 prophecy was fulfilled, that the Lord 
 sent Dr. Jones and Dr. Edgerton to 
 deliver me. Won't they?" 
 [83] 
 
THE VOICE OF THE LORD 
 
 "No, they won't," I answered — "not 
 if Edgerton and I have any influence 
 with the city editors they won't. They 
 won't say anything more about you — 
 ever." 
 
 She was silent for a time, until Edger- 
 ton stepped over to help her on with 
 her coat. Grasping it with one hand, 
 she turned and raised the other above 
 her head, facing me with a pathetic rem- 
 nant of something like her old time fire. 
 
 "The Voice of the Lord!" she said. 
 "He sent you to deliver me, to be the 
 instrument of my glory. If you don't 
 believe me, ask him. When you pray 
 to him, ask him. He will tell you I 
 was sent to restore prophecy upon the 
 earth." 
 
 As I looked at her, her shrunken 
 arm quivering in the air, her every 
 feature lined with the handwriting of 
 death, my heart was in my throat. 
 
 "You ask him," I answered, "You 
 will see him first." 
 
 [84] 
 
THE VOICE OF THE LORD 
 
 I stood watching her a long way down 
 the street. Leaning lifelessly upon Ed- 
 gerton's arm, she walked with him to 
 the corner, where they climbed into a 
 cab. Thus she passed forever out of 
 my sight. 
 
 [85] 
 
IV 
 
 THE WOMAN DIVIDED 
 
She Came to Sob Out Her Perplexity ix My Study 
 
THE WOMAN DIVIDED 
 
 THE FOURTH OF THE EXPERIENCES 
 
 ANY times I have thought 
 about her since, and won- 
 dered whether she had the 
 courage to keep it up. 
 
 She was one of the thousands who 
 make up the ordinary run of women 
 whom ministers meet — one of those 
 good women, undistinguished even in 
 their troubles and their sin. They are 
 the Marthas, "cumbered with much serv- 
 ing"; the Marys, who are the keepers 
 of the world's faith; the widows, who, 
 out of their want, cast into the treasury 
 of service all that they have; and the 
 other Marys, who are remembered grate- 
 fully by mankind because they sink 
 their whole existence in the life and 
 development of their sons. These, and 
 [89] 
 
THE WOMAN DIVIDED 
 
 not the women whose stories have been 
 told in the preceding articles, are the 
 usual companions of the pastor's daily 
 travel. There are a thousand good 
 women to make smooth the path of the 
 servant of the Lord for every one who 
 would cause him to stumble. Were 
 it not so, the ministry and the world 
 it ministers to would be very dreary 
 places. 
 
 A glance through the diary of a single 
 year recalls so many of those who 
 have cast their little burdens upon the 
 preacher, as the Lord's local represen- 
 tative, that one hardly knows whom 
 to select. There was Miss Dickson, 
 for example, who taught six days a week 
 in the high school, and one day in our 
 Sunday school. She was earnest and 
 attractive and wonderfully good — but 
 when her oldest boy pupil, who was 
 nineteen, persuaded her that she was 
 the only woman in the world who could 
 make his life happy, she came to sob 
 [90] 
 
THE WOMAN DIVIDED 
 
 out her perplexity in my study. She 
 did love him — at least she was sure she 
 did; at least she thought she did — but 
 she was thirty-three — I knew the folly 
 of it and tried to explain. I had had a 
 friend, a boy, who had married a woman 
 nearly twice his age; I knew what their 
 life had been. But in spite of all I 
 could do Miss Dickson and her pupil 
 drifted nearer and nearer the rapids, 
 until the town began to talk, and the 
 parents of the boy came to me also to 
 protest angrily that he was being lured 
 and preyed upon by a designing woman. 
 I invited them all to dinner one night 
 — Miss Dickson, her boy pupil, my 
 friend who had married a woman twice 
 his age and the woman herself, who 
 legally was still his wife, though the 
 love that they thought was divine had 
 long since given place to something that 
 was almost hate. That was a very 
 peculiar dinner — I remember it very 
 well. 
 
 [91] 
 
THE WOMAN DIVIDED 
 
 There was Mrs. Emmons, whose hus- 
 band had left her twenty thousand dol- 
 lars — and the plausible gentleman who 
 sought to acquire it. It cost me no 
 little trouble to discover that gentle- 
 man's previous record, but I felt 
 repaid on the afternoon when they 
 both sat in my study together while, 
 in my best pulpit voice, I read it to 
 them. 
 
 I remember Elsie Maitland, who came, 
 quivering and tearful, to tell me that 
 her mother objected to Jack, that Jack 
 was the best man in the world and that 
 they were going to be married. Mrs. 
 Maitland came the next day to say that 
 Elsie was not yet of age and that if 
 they ever did carry out their threat to 
 elope she would have Jack arrested, and 
 didn't I think she was right .^^ But that 
 very day Jack, and Elsie made good 
 their threat, and that night Mrs. Mait- 
 land rushed back to me with a telegram: 
 ''We are married. Coming home to- 
 [92] 
 
THE WOMAN DIVIDED 
 
 morrow on Number 42. Won't you 
 forgive? Elsie." Number Forty-two ar- 
 rived at four o'clock the next afternoon, 
 and Mrs. Maitland was on the plat- 
 form with a deputy sheriff. But I had 
 met the train at Roxbury, which was 
 twelve miles up the track. 
 
 I remember them all, Heaven bless 
 them. They make up the humor and 
 the pathos, the romance and the bitter 
 trial, and the eternal worth-whileness 
 of the minister's lot. But their stories 
 do not belong in this article. I was 
 speaking, as I recall, of The Woman 
 Divided, and I couldn't help wondering 
 whether she had had the courage to 
 keep it up. 
 
 I met him several times before I 
 met her. He was big and self confident 
 and declamatory, even in his clothes. 
 Some one introduced me to him at the 
 horse show, that annual torment for 
 which one of my well-to-do parishioners 
 sent me tickets that I felt bound to use, 
 [93] 
 
THE WOMAN DIVIDED 
 
 and he astonished me by announcing 
 that he intended to take a "box" in my 
 church. I gasped, but recovered my- 
 self in time to assure him that he would 
 be welcome. Later I learned that he 
 had recently moved into the biggest 
 house>in town, having made his money 
 late in life, out of some patented kind 
 of soap. The next Sunday, just after 
 the first hymn, I saw him at the rear of 
 the church, apparently arguing with the 
 usher, who conducted him, at length, 
 down the aisle and seated him at the 
 very front. He looked up at me and 
 waved his hand affably, but I was busy 
 with the hymn book and pretended not 
 to see. 
 
 At the close of the service he was the 
 first to speak to me. 
 
 "Fine, Doctor; simply splendid!" 
 His voice boomed out like the biggest 
 pipe on the organ. "I want to come 
 here regular; wish you'd put up my 
 name for membership. And I'd like to 
 [94] 
 
THE WOMAN DIVIDED 
 
 have you come to my house, sir. When 
 will you come?" 
 
 I told him I should be glad to call. 
 He pressed the invitation at each suc- 
 ceeding service but for several weeks I 
 was so busy with other duties that I 
 could not find time to redeem my prom- 
 ise. Then one morning I missed him 
 from his place at the front; and, thus 
 reminded of my neglect, I determined 
 to make my call that week. 
 
 A butler opened the door — the only 
 butler, I believe, that our little city 
 boasted — and I was ushered into a 
 reception room finished in mahogany 
 and crowded with gold furniture. The 
 butler disappeared upstairs and returned 
 after a few minutes to report that Mr. 
 Dives was absent from the city, but 
 that Mrs. Dives would be down. It 
 was the first time I had heard that there 
 was a Mrs. Dives. 
 
 A little later her footsteps pattered 
 softly on the padded stairway and then 
 [95] 
 
THE WOMAN DIVIDED 
 
 stopped suddenly, commanded by a 
 querulous whisper that was shrill enough 
 to reach my own ears. 
 
 "Mother, you can't go down: you 
 don't look fit." 
 
 It was the voice of a girl, apparently 
 the daughter of the house. I could 
 sense the mother's hesitation and self- 
 consciousness: she stopped, took a step 
 back, and then, as though acting with 
 unaccustomed resolution, continued 
 down. Even as she entered the room 
 I could hear the voice above complain- 
 ing to somebody that mother looked 
 "perfectly awful," and that she couldn't 
 imagine what could have "got into her." 
 
 I suspect that she knew I had heard, 
 for her face was flushed and embar- 
 rassed as she stepped through the door 
 and held out her hand to me. She was 
 a little woman whose clothes fitted her 
 badly. Her hair was drawn tight across 
 her forehead, but there was a wistful 
 sort of tenderness in her face which was 
 [96] 
 
THE WOMAN DIVIDED 
 
 attractive. I remember thinking that a 
 little care on the part of someone that 
 understood such things might have made 
 her very attractive. 
 
 The hand that she held out to me 
 was large in proportion to the rest of 
 her body; but it was well formed. 
 
 "Mr. Dives is away," she began, and 
 stopped as though not quite sure what 
 to say next. 
 
 "I am very glad of the opportunity 
 to meet you," I replied. "I have not 
 yet had a chance to welcome you to 
 our services." 
 
 I thought she might say something in 
 explanation, and indeed she started to 
 but ended with an embarrassed little 
 laugh. I changed the subject quickly. 
 They had been in the city only a few 
 months, she told me, having come from 
 the little out-of-the-way town where 
 her husband's factory had been located. 
 He had sold his interests, which had 
 kept them confined and so here they 
 [97] 
 
THE WOMAN DIVIDED 
 
 were, in a big house, realizing the dreams 
 of their youth. 
 
 Once guided into these more familiar 
 channels the conversation ran smoothly, 
 with now and then a bit of sparkle. 
 Indeed, my estimate of Mrs. Dives' 
 charm and intellectual ability grew as 
 our talk proceeded. She was really a 
 very unusual woman and I thought 
 again it was a pity that no one had ever 
 taught her to advertise her charm in 
 her appearance. 
 
 As I prepared to leave, I ventured 
 to repeat the hope that she might be 
 present with her husband at our Sunday 
 services; and again, suddenly, her face 
 clouded. The sparkle died out of her 
 manner; she became somehow dull and 
 reserved. It was as complete a trans- 
 formation as I have ever seen. The 
 woman who had charmed me by her 
 vivacious intelligence vanished, and left 
 in her place the timid creature who had 
 stood shrinking in the doorway. 
 [98] 
 
THE WOMAN DIVIDED 
 
 "I should like to come," she said. 
 "I want — " and then suddenly — "Doc- 
 tor, may I come to see you sometime at 
 your study?" 
 
 "Assuredly," I answered; "come 
 Monday morning." 
 
 "Thanks — thank you — thank you 
 so much," she stammered. I wondered 
 what she meant. 
 
 Monday morning I looked up from 
 my desk to see a carriage draw up be- 
 fore the door, and after a moment she 
 descended from it, dressed as I had 
 seen her at the house, with the addition 
 of a hat strangely unbecoming. As I 
 watched her walk toward the door I 
 wondered which woman was coming 
 to me — the self-reliant, clear-thinking 
 woman of whom I had caught a glimpse 
 at the house, whose keen mind — so 
 rumor said and so I could well believe 
 — had planned out her husband's suc- 
 cess; or the shrinking, timid creature 
 who had drawn back within herself 
 [99] 
 
THE WOMAN DIVIDED 
 
 when I suggested that she come with 
 him to church. 
 
 I had not long to wonder; the half- 
 apologetic knock with which she an- 
 nounced her arrival testified that she 
 came in fear and trembling. I sought 
 to increase her confidence with my 
 welcome, and made her as comfortable 
 as I could. 
 
 **I'm going to help you," I said, when 
 she had settled herself and while she 
 was casting about in her mind as to how 
 she would begin. "I am going to tell 
 you why you came to me." 
 
 She looked at me half fearfully, half 
 gratefully. "Oh, if you only could," 
 she murmured. 
 
 *'You want to tell me that you can't 
 come to church with your husband 
 because he doesn't want you to come." 
 
 It was a long, dangerous chance to 
 
 take, but I knew instantly by the look 
 
 in her eyes that I was not mistaken. 
 
 But the almost brutal frankness of my 
 
 [100] 
 
THE WOMAN DIVIDED 
 
 statement shocked her into pained pro- 
 test. 
 
 "You mustn't say that, Doctor. Mr. 
 Dives — my husband — is very, very 
 kind to me." 
 
 "Kind — surely," I answered. "You 
 mean that he allows you all the money 
 that you need. But why shouldn't he; 
 you helped him to make it." 
 
 She was silent and I pressed the 
 point. 
 
 "Didn't you?" 
 
 "Yes, I did." It was the other woman 
 asserting herself, the woman who had 
 charmed me by the clearness of her 
 thought at our first meeting. "I did 
 help him," she repeated. "He couldn't 
 have done it without me. He bought 
 the formula for the soap from a peddler, 
 but I made it up on my stove in the 
 kitchen. Hours and hours I stirred it 
 in those first years before the factory 
 came. That's why my hands are like 
 this — look at them," and she pushed 
 [101] 
 
THE WOMAN DIVIDED 
 
 them out toward me. "The stirring 
 did that. And now — " her voice fal- 
 tered and broke a little, "and now he 
 says they're too big — " 
 
 It was the other woman back again, 
 timid, cringing, ready almost to cry. 
 
 "And he won't take you to church," 
 I said, "because he doesn't think you 
 look well enough. And your daughter 
 patronizes you, and you're tired of it all, 
 and wish you had never helped him to 
 succeed. Is that it.^^" 
 
 I knew it was a rough speech. I had 
 no mind to have her crying in the study. 
 The other woman in her — the strong 
 aggressive one — would resent that at- 
 tack upon her husband, I thought; and so 
 it proved. She straightened, suddenly, 
 rose and faced me with real dignity. 
 
 "I did not come here to have my 
 husband insulted. Doctor Jones. You 
 do not understand. Good morning." 
 
 She started to go, but I reached the 
 door before her. 
 
 [102] 
 
THE WOMAN DIVIDED 
 
 "Now," I said, "we can talk. I 
 wanted you to say that; I wanted to 
 put you in a frame of mind where I 
 could talk to you. You're in that frame 
 of mind now. Sit down; I can help 
 
 you." 
 
 For a moment I thought she would 
 leave, in spite of my plea. When she 
 was finally seated again the defiant look 
 still held its place in her eye. She 
 would not cry now, I felt sure, no matter 
 what I said. 
 
 And so I told her the truth very 
 bluntly, drawing generously on my imag- 
 ination, and guiding myself by her 
 changing expressions, which told her 
 story, had she but known it, as clearly 
 as though it had been acted on a stage. 
 I sketched their life together in the 
 little village, where they had first 
 dreamed the success that his fortunate 
 discovery, and her genius, had at length 
 made real. 
 
 I went farther back than that even 
 [103] 
 
THE WOMAN DIVIDED 
 
 — into her girlhood — and introduced to 
 her the two spirits, the two girls, who 
 had inhabited her soul. There was the 
 girl who would dare anything, who led 
 the crowd and counted even some of 
 the boys among her followers; and there 
 was the other girl, who, depressed by a 
 moment of failure, would draw herself 
 away into settled retirement and morbid 
 introspection. I told her story, not in 
 terms of her life, but in terms of the 
 life of these two — the one carrying her 
 husband upward upon the wings of her 
 vision, the other, dormant through their 
 earlier married life because of the vital- 
 ity of their love and achievement, cast- 
 ing over these later years an evil spirit 
 of introspection and self-pity and 
 neglect. 
 
 **You are not a woman," I said. 
 **You are two women. I knew it when 
 I talked with you at your home. You 
 were one woman when you came cring- 
 ing through the doorway to meet me 
 [104] 
 
THE WOMAN DIVIDED 
 
 and an entirely different woman when 
 the conversation stirred the memory of 
 your days of happiness and success. 
 The second woman demanded much of 
 your husband, and gave him much in 
 return; the other shrivelled under a 
 bit of fancied neglect and thereafter 
 neither demanded nor gave. That's 
 your trouble. You can't blame your 
 husband for leaving the first woman at 
 home. What you must do to be saved 
 is to resurrect the other one, and, having 
 done so, keep her permanently on the 
 throne." 
 
 Her eyes were wide open in amaze- 
 ment. "How did you know all that?" 
 she demanded. 
 
 "You told me." 
 
 "I.? I haven't told you anything." 
 
 "Yes you have. Every line of it 
 has written itself as plainly as could be 
 on your face; I have merely read out to 
 you what I saw. And I am right, am 
 I not?" 
 
 [ 105 ] 
 
THE WOMAN DIVIDED 
 
 "Yes." 
 
 "Then you must trust me absolutely. 
 You must do exactly wliat I say; you 
 must carry it through no matter what 
 the cost." 
 
 Then I told her what she must do. 
 At first she was incredulous; the doubt- 
 ing woman in her lifted up a voice of 
 protest. But I convinced her at length. 
 We pored over the time-table and laid 
 out her route to New York. Then I 
 sent her over to the parsonage to talk 
 with Mrs. Jones and to secure the ad- 
 dresses of those artificers in New York 
 who by means of gowns and hair-dress- 
 ing and facial massage, and heaven 
 knows what else, can bring back to life 
 the soul of a woman that has been a 
 long time dead. 
 
 "But how shall I tell my husband.^" 
 she demanded, as she was about to leave 
 the study. 
 
 "Tell him what.?^" 
 "That I am going." 
 [106] 
 
THE WOMAN DIVIDED 
 
 "Don't tell him," I said. "Write 
 him. Just go." 
 
 She went. I hope Heaven has for- 
 given me for the deception that en- 
 shrouded those next two weeks. True, 
 I have never prayed to be forgiven, con- 
 sidering that the end justified the means, 
 but at least I have promised never to 
 do it again. For they were two terrible 
 weeks. 
 
 Three days after she had gone I met 
 Dives on the street. Rather, I took 
 occasion to meet him. It was a nec- 
 essary part of the day's work — just as 
 necessary as the long letter that went 
 every night to Mrs. Dives in the city, 
 telling her that under no circumstances 
 must she come home until I sent for 
 her, and commanding her — that is the 
 right word — to buy new dresses, no 
 matter how tired she got or how much 
 they cost. 
 
 "Won't you and Mrs. Dives come up 
 to dinner tonight.?" I said to Dives, 
 [107] 
 
THE WOMAN DIVIDED 
 
 and I ought to have blushed with guilt 
 at the words. 
 
 "Thanks ever so much," he responded, 
 "but Mrs. Dives is out of the city for a 
 day or two. Gone to New York on a 
 little pleasure trip." He said it jauntily 
 — a little too jauntily, I thought. 
 
 I went home to find another letter 
 from Mrs. Dives saying that she was 
 homesick and must come back. And I 
 wired her sternly that if she let the weak 
 woman in her creep into another letter 
 I should never attempt to help her 
 again. Whether that rebuke drove the 
 weak woman into retirement or whether 
 the wiles of the dressmaker and the 
 hair-dresser had wakened the strong 
 one into full life I do not know. But 
 from that time her letters took on a new, 
 confident, happy note which had in it 
 all the joy of her earlier days, and in- 
 cluded also the self-assurance of a woman 
 who knows her world and feels herself 
 a mistress in it. 
 
 [108] 
 
THE WOMAN DIVIDED 
 
 I had purposely let Dives alone for 
 a week, but when with her letter she 
 enclosed one from him complaining be- 
 cause she did not come back, I knew 
 it was time to talk with him again. 
 
 "You and Mrs. Dives are coming to 
 dinner tonight," I said to him over the 
 telephone. 
 
 He was jBustered; I could read it in 
 the tones of his reply. 
 
 "Awfully kind of you. Doctor; but 
 you see — The truth is Mrs. Dives 
 hasn't got back yet — unexpected delay, 
 you understand." 
 
 "That's too bad," I replied. "We'd 
 like to have you both; but we'll have 
 you anyway. Six-thirty sharp. We'll 
 count on you" — and I hung the re- 
 ceiver up before he had a chance to 
 refuse. 
 
 It was a different man who dined 
 
 with us that night. He had lost much 
 
 of his jauntiness, and though he made 
 
 a brave effort to maintain his usual 
 
 [109] 
 
THE WOMAN DIVIDED 
 
 blustering good fellowship the result 
 could hardly be termed a success. There 
 were rings under his eyes, as though he 
 had lost sleep, and the hand that reached 
 out to take his cup of coffee shook a 
 little. But not until late in the even- 
 ing did we let the conversation drift 
 to the subject which was uppermost in 
 all our minds. My wife, whose general- 
 ship can always be counted on in mat- 
 ters of the kind, delivered the first shot. 
 
 "We enjoy Mrs. Dives so much. She 
 is perfectly charming. She is going to 
 join our Ladies' Society." 
 
 Dives could not conceal his astonish- 
 ment. His wife in a Ladies' Society! 
 She hadn't joined anything since the 
 day she first began to stir the soap — 
 he had long ago lost any thought of 
 her as a social being. 
 
 "Yes," I hastened to add, "and why 
 didn't you tell us that she sang.^ She's 
 going to join our choir, too." 
 
 "She's a wonderful little woman," 
 [110] 
 
THE WOMAN DIVIDED 
 
 mused my wife. '*When does she come 
 back?" 
 
 "I really don't — That is to say — 
 I'm going up to New York day after 
 tomorrow — yes, we've arranged to meet 
 there and come back together." 
 
 He was preparing to go. 
 
 "You must both of you come to 
 dinner when you get back," I said. 
 "Mrs. Dives has told me so much 
 about your life that I feel as though we 
 were all very old friends." 
 
 "She's a wonderful little woman," 
 mused my wife again. 
 
 He turned upon her with something 
 like his old buoyant spirit. "She cer- 
 tainly is," he said, "a perfect wonder." 
 
 "Day after tomorrow," he had said. 
 That gave me time to get my letter to 
 her if I wrote it that night. And so 
 I did, sitting up late to finish it and 
 walking down alone through the quiet 
 streets to drop it in at the post office. 
 And I trembled almost as I saw it dis- 
 [111] 
 
THE WOMAN DIVIDED 
 
 appear through the slot in the door; 
 for there are times when even a preacher 
 shrinks back at the thought of reaching 
 his hand down so deep into the recesses 
 of a human soul. Yet I told her the 
 truth as I saw it. There is no copy 
 of the letter, but I remember a part at 
 least of what it said: 
 
 "Dear Mrs. Dives, — It is time now 
 to come home. As soon as you receive 
 this, wire your husband that you will 
 arrive on Number Forty-two and ash him 
 to meet you. Do not delay; because he 
 "plans to start for New York on Wednesday 
 to bring you bach with him, and it is 
 better, I thinh, that you should meet him 
 here. 
 
 " You are not different from many other 
 sensitive women, or indeed men, for that 
 matter. I have hnown many lihe you, 
 whose lives were really a battlefield on 
 which two natures contended for the mas- 
 tery. Most poets and generals, villains 
 and preachers are of that sort — most all 
 [112] 
 
THE WOMAN DIVIDED 
 
 of the really worth-while folks in the world. 
 You realize it now that I have pointed it 
 out to you. You see that it explains 
 everything in your life which you have 
 found hard to understand. You remember 
 how, even in girlhood, the spirit in you 
 that was self-reliant and radiant and 
 optimistic would carry you forward for 
 days or even weeks at a time, only to be 
 set upon and vanquished in some inex- 
 plicable fashion by the other spirit, which 
 caused you to draw in upon yourself, to 
 be introspective and unhappy and de- 
 pressed. In olden days they called it 
 being possessed of a devil — this surrender 
 to the love-sapping, self-conscious spirit. 
 Now we call it simply bad management 
 or inefficiency or selfishness or lack 
 of self-control. 
 
 ** Through the first years of your mar- 
 ried life, when your blood ran fast with 
 the joy of achievement, you kept it down — 
 this other spirit; and only in these later 
 years — when you have had less to occupy 
 [lis] 
 
THE WOMAN DIVIDED 
 
 you, when changes in your life have come 
 fast — has it spread its control insidi- 
 ously, until, without your realizing it, 
 your real self, the self of your happier, 
 younger days, has been entirely subdued, 
 "/ saw it on the afternoon I first met 
 you — the battle of the two spirits. My 
 call came at a happy moment — when 
 something of the old thrill of living was 
 on you — and you came down to meet me 
 in obedience to a sudden impulse, though 
 I venture to say that you had denied 
 yourself to all other visitors since you 
 arrived in town. But the better impulse 
 carried you only to the parlor door. You 
 surrendered to the old spirit there; you 
 cringed — that's a mean little word, but 
 ifs true — you would have turned back if 
 you could. While we talked about your 
 earlier life with Mr. Dives and your 
 struggles together, something of the old 
 fire came back; you were a different 
 woman — the charming, enthusiastic, pur- 
 poseful woman that your husband first 
 [114] 
 
THE WOMAN DIVIDED 
 
 loved. And then, as I left you, you shrank 
 back again. You could not come to 
 church, you told me; you seldom went 
 out; Mr. Dives usually went alone. That 
 was your evil spirit in the saddle again. 
 
 ''You have told yourself that your 
 husband was drawing away from you and 
 that was true in a sense. He has gone on 
 and on in the bounding, buoyant spirit 
 of his youth, meeting new people, growing 
 into new responsibilities, enjoying his life 
 to the full. And you, instead of bounding 
 along at his side, have stood still. Of 
 course he has drawn away from you. You 
 stayed at home when he wanted you to go 
 with him — until after a while he didnH 
 ask you any more. You forgot how to 
 dress; you let his interests multiply with- 
 out your help; you let your daughter lose 
 her respect for you. And you thought 
 your husband had ceased to love you, when 
 really it was you who had killed the woman 
 whom he used to love. 
 
 "Now you are coming back. You will 
 [115] 
 
THE WOMAN DIVIDED 
 
 be radiant and happy when you alight from 
 the train. You will be prettier than yon 
 have been in years, and better dressed. 
 You will be full of the joy of your re- 
 cent experiences. He will meet you and 
 you will be a new woman to him — or 
 rather the old woman, the woman of his 
 own boyhood dreams. And you must 
 keep him in that spirit. 
 
 ''One word more. Love feeds upon 
 sacrifice; it grows strong only when 
 strong demands are put upon it. You 
 stopped demanding anything of your hus- 
 band years ago. You must begin de- 
 manding of him again — begin the minute 
 you meet him on the platform. He must 
 feel in that minute that you expect to con- 
 tribute much to his life from nov) on, and, 
 in turn, to demand much from him. Be- 
 gin by demanding something in that 
 moment; you might, for instance, drop 
 your glove and let him pick it up. Let 
 him start from that moment to feed his 
 love upon sacrifice — just as you will 
 [116] 
 
THE WOMAN DIVIDED 
 
 start to feed it upon optimism, and good 
 cheer and the old vibrant interest in his 
 affairs. 
 
 "/ shall not see you when you arrive. 
 I have done all that I can for you. From 
 now on you must carry your life forward 
 in your own strength. But I shall pray 
 for you. And you are going to be very 
 happy. Remember that always — very, 
 very happy." 
 
 I heard Number Forty-two whistle 
 at four o'clock the next afternoon, just 
 as I was stepping out of the barber 
 shop across the street from the station. 
 It is dark at four o'clock in November, 
 and almost without knowing it I turned 
 my steps in the direction of the station. 
 I could not resist the temptation; the 
 thought of the two had been with me 
 all day. 
 
 His carriage was at the end of the 
 
 platform. I slipped behind it and came 
 
 up among the group at the station door 
 
 without being observed. He was pacing 
 
 [117] 
 
THE WOMAN DIVIDED 
 
 restlessly up and down at the place 
 where the single Pullman car on Forty- 
 two would stop. He did not see me, nor 
 anything else, apparently. His eyes 
 were turned intently to the oncoming 
 locomotive, which pitched and swayed 
 and finally halted. With one bound he 
 was on the platform of the Pullman. 
 He was nervous, almost painfully so — 
 but hardly more nervous than I. 
 
 Which woman would come down, I 
 wondered — the strong self-reliant, ra- 
 diant woman, or the tired, depressed, 
 shrinking one. Would she slink into 
 his arms or would she stand straight and 
 smiling, waiting for him to take her? 
 Would it be the wife of his youth who 
 came back to him or the wife of his 
 last three years .^^ 
 
 All this raced through my mind in an 
 instant, while a bent old man was mak- 
 ing his way painfully out of the car and 
 onto the platform. Then suddenly, al- 
 most with a bound, it seemed to me, 
 [118] 
 
THE WOMAN DIVIDED 
 
 she alighted. She was new-robed from 
 head to foot in clothes of a style that 
 had not yet reached our little city. Her 
 veil was pushed back in that alluring 
 way that women know, and her face 
 fairly shone. I slipped up beside them: 
 I could not help it and they never knew 
 — they would hardly have turned had 
 I shouted in their ears. 
 
 "Marion," he cried, and took her in 
 his arms. "Oh, Marion, it's good to 
 have you home!" 
 
 And then the great thing happened. 
 She gave a startled little cry, and 
 pointed to the car. 
 
 "Oh George, quick — " she said, "IVe 
 left my purse on the car!" 
 
 I saw him leap again for the platform 
 and a moment later, just as I turned 
 the corner of the station, I looked 
 again, to see him swing off the end of 
 the last coach, waving her purse in his 
 hand and smiling like a boy out of 
 school. 
 
 [119] 
 
THE WOMAN DIVIDED 
 
 They went away to Europe that 
 winter. He told me boyishly that they 
 had planned it out and dreamed about 
 it years before, but that lately his wife 
 had rather given up the idea. And 
 before they returned I had been called 
 away to another charge. But I have 
 thought of them many times in the 
 years that have passed, and wondered 
 whether she has had the courage and 
 the power to keep it up. 
 
 I believe she has. 
 
 [120] 
 
THE SHADOW ON 
 SCREEN 
 
 THE 
 
THE SHADOW ON THE SCREEN 
 
 THE FIFTH OF THE EXPERIENCES 
 
 DO not pretend to explain every 
 detail of this story. Those for whom 
 ^ there are no mysteries under the 
 sun, who brush aside every manifesta- 
 tion of the Unknown with the mere 
 murmur of their charm word ** coin- 
 cidence" will, of course, find nothing in 
 it worthy of explanation. But I con- 
 fess that I have never succeeded in 
 bringing myself into that easy-going, 
 undiscriminating attitude of mind. 
 There have been too many experiences 
 in my ministry that have passed beyond 
 the border of the finite; too many occa- 
 sions when, coming to a sudden rift 
 in the road, I have stretched out my 
 hand and felt it closed in the strong 
 [ 123] 
 
THE SHADOW ON THE SCREEN 
 
 grasp of a hand I could not see. Every 
 minister who has kept the faith knows 
 the rich reality of such experiences. 
 
 One of them came in the very first 
 year of our work, when the drouth had 
 blasted the crops of our people and we, 
 with them, stood within the very shadow 
 of want. I remember how on the day 
 when our last dollar had gone for relief, 
 when I did not know where we should 
 find food for another meal, there came 
 a letter from an almost-forgotten friend 
 in the North, and in it a check for $100. 
 "Coincidence," you say. But was it 
 merely a coincidence that the help 
 should come from an apparently impos- 
 sible source in the very moment of our 
 extremity.^ Perhaps it was; but I can- 
 not think so. 
 
 I remember that when the message 
 came my little boy, a thousand miles 
 away, lay dying, and I remember the 
 agony of spirit in which for seven hours 
 I wrestled with the Lord, that life might 
 [124] 
 
THE SHADOW ON THE SCREEN 
 
 be returned to him. Suddenly, just as 
 the sun dipped behind the horizon, a 
 voice as clear as any voice I have ever 
 heard said, "Peace, be still! Your son 
 lives." Sunset was at five-thirty that 
 day; I was concerned enough to look 
 it up in the daily newspaper. And it 
 was just at that hour, so his mother 
 told me afterwards, that our little boy, a 
 thousand miles away, turned his hot 
 fevered face to the wall and dropped 
 into a saving sleep. There are those 
 who will be satisfied to label that, too, a 
 "coincidence"; it pleases me to know 
 that it was the voice of God. 
 
 And so with the Widow Marshall — 
 for even to this day I cannot recall 
 that she had any other name. I only 
 know that her boy did come back, and 
 in the way here set down. But whether 
 the circumstances of his return were 
 of chance occurrence or in fulfillment of 
 faith I leave each one of you to answer 
 for himself. 
 
 [ 125 ] 
 
THE SHADOW ON THE SCREEN 
 
 On my arrival my predecessor in the 
 parish had described her to me. I have 
 always remembered him very gratefully 
 because of that. Ordinarily a minister 
 comes into a new parish after his pred- 
 ecessor has left and without friends or 
 acquaintances to whom he may look 
 for advice; and the wonder is that he 
 ever survives the diplomatic demands 
 and exigencies of the first few weeks. In 
 this case, however, the predecessor, good 
 shepherd that he was, went over the 
 whole flock, calling each sheep by name 
 from the greatest even to the least, 
 from the whitest through the brown and 
 dark brown and even to the black. 
 When he had finished I knew enough 
 about the individual characteristics and 
 idiosyncracies of my new charges to 
 guard me from offending any of them 
 at the outset. 
 
 But the Widow Marshall he did not men- 
 tion at all until I called his attention to 
 the fact that he had passed over her name. 
 [126] 
 
THE SHADOW ON THE SCREEN 
 
 "Oh, you needn't bother much about 
 her," he said. "She's just a poor old 
 widow who lives away out on the edge 
 of things somewhere. A good worker, 
 though; always on hand to help with 
 the church suppers and all that. I 
 meant to call on her sometimes but you 
 know how it is — and of course she's 
 not really very important." 
 
 "Does she have any family.^" I asked. 
 
 "No. Wait! Let's see — there is 
 some story about her having a boy who 
 went away — now how is that.^^" He 
 passed his hand back and forth across 
 the bald spot on his head — which was 
 his habit when perplexed — but appar- 
 ently the friction provoked no further 
 remembrance. "She has a story," he 
 added finally. "Somebody told me her 
 story once — but I can't remember. 
 And, anyway, she's not very important. 
 Might be a good plan for you to call on 
 her sometime, though, after you've called 
 on the folks who expect it." 
 [127] 
 
THE SHADOW ON THE SCREEN 
 
 And I made up my mind I would call. 
 
 The church gave us a reception — a 
 horrible habit churches have in wel- 
 coming a new pastor — and all the 
 membership filed by us in a long, be- 
 wildering procession, leaving us with 
 weary hands and arms and a confused 
 babble of names in our minds. When 
 there was a little break, I caught eagerly 
 at the suggestion of the wife of one of 
 the trustees that I might look over 
 the arrangement of the church and par- 
 ticularly the kitchen, of which the ladies 
 were very proud. 
 
 As we entered the kitchen door I 
 noticed a woman standing at the stove, 
 her sleeves rolled to her elbows and her 
 cheeks suffused with the ruddy glow 
 which the heat imparts. She must have 
 been between forty-five and fifty, with 
 the ample bust and hips that used to 
 be an essential part of all artist's pic- 
 tures of "mother." Her hair had loos- 
 ened a little and wreathed about her 
 [128] 
 
THE SHADOW ON THE SCREEN 
 
 face, which was mild and round and 
 mellowed, as though there had been 
 rains of sorrow dispelled by sunbeams of 
 self-forgetfulness more resolute and 
 abiding. 
 
 She turned toward us with a half- 
 apologetic little smile, but my guide 
 apparently did not see her. I caught 
 the smile, though, the timid start in our 
 direction, and the embarrassed halt as 
 she saw that we were about to pass her 
 by. In her confusion she dropped a 
 spoon and I hastened to pick it up and 
 hand it to her. 
 
 "I am the new minister," I said to 
 her. "I don't think we have met." 
 
 My words seemed to add to her con- 
 fusion. She started to speak, but my 
 guide had bustled up, intent on handling 
 the situation. 
 
 "This is Mrs. Marshall, Doctor. — My 
 
 dear, this is Dr. Jones, our new pastor. 
 
 — Mrs. Marshall never gets out into 
 
 the church parlors, Doctor; she always 
 
 [ 129 ] 
 
THE SHADOW ON THE SCREEN 
 
 finds SO much to keep her busy here in 
 the kitchen. We all say that she is 
 one of our most useful members." 
 
 It was spoken in a voice meant to 
 be kind, but there was an air of con- 
 descension which said plainly enough, 
 "You needn't waste any time here. 
 Doctor; it won't be appreciated. This 
 is only Mrs. Marshall; she's not quite 
 in our class, of course, but she's very 
 useful at church dinners." And it did 
 me good to see that Mrs. Marshall, 
 even underneath her timidity, sensed the 
 tone of patronage and resented it. 
 
 I determined, in spite of my guide's 
 obvious restlessness, to have a talk with 
 Mrs. Marshall but I was thwarted by a 
 peremptory call from the parlor. I 
 held out my hand, and she took it in 
 her big, motherly clasp, still moist from 
 the dishwater. 
 
 "I am coming to call on you very 
 soon," I said. "I want to know the 
 really important members of the con- 
 [130] 
 
THE SHADOW ON THE SCREEN 
 
 gregation, the ones that do the real 
 work." 
 
 "Oh, thank you," she responded. 
 And then, as though not quite sure of 
 herself, "perhaps — perhaps you and 
 Mrs. Jones would come to supper." 
 
 "Supper," I repeated. "Supper! I 
 haven't heard that blessed word since 
 we reached this big city. I had begun 
 to think that nobody here has any 
 supper. You better believe we will come 
 and just as soon as you say the word." 
 
 The conversation had not pleased my 
 guide. She turned to me with an af- 
 fected little laugh as we made our way 
 toward the parlor. 
 
 "All things to all men I see, Doctor," 
 she said, "and all women too. Do you 
 know, you said that as though you 
 really meant it.^" 
 
 But I pretended not to hear her. 
 
 I looked for Mrs. Marshall at the 
 following Sunday morning service. It 
 was some time before I discovered her 
 [131] 
 
THE SHADOW ON THE SCREEN 
 
 tucked away under a corner of the 
 gallery. She was gowned in a plain 
 black suit, which even from a distance 
 appeared to have shrunk about her 
 ample figure, but there was a wholesome 
 sincerity in her eager gaze that drew 
 my eyes back to her repeatedly. Per- 
 haps I was just a little homesick. We 
 had come from a country parish to the 
 new church, a large one in an eastern 
 city, and I felt a well-bred aloofness 
 on the part of the congregation, which 
 contrasted jarringly with the rude in- 
 formality to which we had been accus- 
 tomed. Through that atmosphere of 
 strangeness, of kindly but rather emo- 
 tionless reserve, the shining countenance 
 of the Widow Marshall beamed out upon 
 me like a benediction from home. There 
 was no dignified reserve in her; she 
 leaned forward eagerly when I an- 
 nounced the text and her appreciation 
 of the sermon as I developed its several 
 phases was registered in successive waves 
 [132] 
 
THE SHADOW ON THE SCREEN 
 
 of gratification across her sensitive face. 
 If that first sermon was a success, as 
 the influential members of my congre- 
 gation were good enough to assure me, 
 it was due not to their courteous atten- 
 tion, but rather to the inspiration flashed 
 up to me from the Widow Marshall, 
 who in her features and dress and un- 
 affected interest represented to me the 
 loving solicitude of my own little con- 
 gregation back home. 
 
 Each Sunday she was in her place 
 promptly but always before I could 
 make my way to the door after the 
 service she had slipped quietly away. 
 The weeks lengthened into months and 
 I had still not fulfilled my promise to 
 call. Then one Sunday I preached from 
 the parable of the Prodigal Son. I 
 thought of her as I announced the text 
 and, glancing over, saw that she had 
 edged forward a little farther than usual 
 on her seat and was gazing straight 
 into my face in rapt attention. The 
 [133] 
 
THE SHADOW ON THE SCREEN 
 
 theme is a favorite one with preachers, 
 and he is indeed lacking in imagination 
 and in enthusiasm for his message who 
 can preach upon it without being Kfted 
 a Httle out of himself. As I traced the 
 story of the boy's wanderings, his life 
 in the far country, his final remorse and 
 repentance and return to his father, I 
 forgot the Widow Marshall and all else 
 in my interest in the story. I pictured 
 the Prodigal coming to the top of the 
 hill overlooking his father's house and 
 then starting down the road that led 
 to the gate; I spoke of the father's 
 glad cry of welcome, the feast prepared 
 to celebrate the home-coming and the 
 final hosanna of thanksgiving. **This 
 my son was dead, and is alive again; 
 he was lost and is found." It was then, 
 at the climax of the story, that there 
 was a slight rustle in the rear of the 
 church and I turned in time to see the 
 Widow Marshall slip out, her handker- 
 chief pressed to her eyes. 
 [ 134] 
 
THE SHADOW ON THE SCREEN 
 
 In that instant there flashed through 
 my mind what my predecessor had told 
 me about her. There was some story, 
 he had said, about her son. I blamed 
 myself that I should have allowed the 
 months to elapse without learning her 
 story, that I had not reserved my sermon 
 on the Prodigal until after my call. 
 Had I by my sermon added to the 
 burden of her grief .^ Had I drawn a 
 rude hand across her heart strings.^ I 
 could hardly wait to drop a note to 
 her — addressing it simply to "Mrs. 
 Marshall," for so her name appeared on 
 our church directory list — recalling her 
 promise to have Mrs. Jones and me to 
 supper and asking if we might come 
 some time during the week. On Tuesday 
 the answer arrived, written on a half 
 sheet of note paper, in a prim, old- 
 fashioned hand. She would be very 
 glad, it said, if we would come to supper 
 on Thursday at six o'clock. 
 
 We were late, for her cottage stood 
 [135] 
 
THE SHADOW ON THE SCREEN 
 
 clear out beyond the city limits in a 
 section totally unfamiliar to me. As 
 we entered the little gate we heard the 
 music of a parlor organ and a voice, 
 which I knew must be hers, raised in the 
 appealing strains of the old mother 
 chant : 
 
 ^'Hush my child, lie still and slumber; 
 Holy angels guard thy bed."" 
 It was the song that my own mother 
 had sung to each one of her six in suc- 
 cession, and I can never hear it without 
 a little tightening about the heart. 
 
 She opened the door for us herself. 
 There was no evidence of the timidity 
 that I had come to expect in her; in- 
 stead, her greeting had in it a quiet 
 dignity. And I liked the fact that she 
 made no apology for the house or the 
 meal. 
 
 "Have you lived here long.^" I asked. 
 
 "About five years. You see, when my 
 husband died I had to find a home that 
 I could maintain, and finally I came 
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THE SHADOW ON THE SCREEN 
 
 clear out here. It's a long way out," 
 she smiled, "but there is air and there 
 are flowers and birds." 
 
 "I think it's lovely," Mrs. Jones said. 
 I could feel in her voice a trace of long- 
 ing for our own cottage in the country 
 parish. 
 
 There was homesickness in the supper, 
 too: in the big slices of home-made 
 bread; in the butter, home-churned; 
 in the home-made pickles and the big 
 apple pie with the juice fairly bursting 
 through the top. Of all the meals I 
 ever ate in that parish — some of them 
 served by butlers in many courses — 
 there was not one that seemed so won- 
 derfully good as that. In the midst of 
 it a mantel clock struck seven and Mrs. 
 Marshall excused herself for a moment. 
 I watched her curiously as she brought 
 in from the kitchen a little kerosene 
 lamp and set it in the parlor window. 
 I noticed then, for the first time, that 
 she had cut a tiny circle from the centre 
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THE SHADOW ON THE SCREEN 
 
 of the curtain, just big enough to allow 
 the lamp's rays to shine through. From 
 the outside the house would appear 
 entirely dark except for this little signal 
 of light and love. The Widow Marshall 
 caught the glance of inquiry in our eyes 
 as she returned to the table, and said 
 simply: 
 
 "It's for my boy; he is away, you 
 know." 
 
 "I know," I said. "Won't you tell 
 us about him.^" 
 
 She hesitated, but I believe she was 
 really grateful for the suggestion. "I 
 haven't talked about it much," she said. 
 But — I think you would understand," 
 I know we should," I assured her, 
 and she smiled — a slow, lingering smile 
 with a touch of pathos in it. 
 
 "It's nearly six years since he went 
 away," she began. "We were still living 
 in Haydensburg at that time." 
 
 " Haydensburg, Ohio!" I exclaimed. 
 "Why, that's in our home county." 
 [138] 
 
 
THE SHADOW ON THE SCREEN 
 
 "I knew it," she responded. "That's 
 why I knew that I should love you as 
 a pastor. From that first night when 
 I saw you at the church in the kitchen 
 I was sure that you would be just like 
 home folks. You see none of the other 
 pastors ever called on me." 
 
 I gritted my teeth to keep back the 
 words my tongue would have spoken 
 about those too-busy, too-discriminat- 
 ing predecessors of mine. I think she 
 noticed it, because she smiled again, a 
 little wistfully. 
 
 "My husband owned the dry goods 
 store out in Haydensburg, and we were 
 very happy there for many years. He 
 was trustee of the church and president 
 of the village board. He was a very 
 strong, commanding man. I have often 
 thought that in a larger sphere my 
 husband would have achieved a great 
 reputation. We had only one child, our 
 boy Samuel. He was our joy, our 
 whole life. Almost from the day he 
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THE SHADOW ON THE SCREEN 
 
 was born, my husband began laying 
 plans for his future. They would go 
 into partnership, he said — it would be 
 "Marshall & Son." They would buy 
 the stores in the adjoining towns and 
 build a chain of stores that might 
 stretch across the state. Every business 
 move that he made was planned with the 
 thought of the boy, and it really seemed, 
 as he would talk to me about it, that 
 there would be no limit to what the two 
 might do together." 
 
 "And how about the boy.?" I asked. 
 
 The last vestige of the smile was lost 
 from her face as she ansv/ered: 
 
 "Do you believe in heredity, Doctor 
 Jones.?" 
 
 "I do," I said; "I think it explains 
 many things that are otherwise unex- 
 plainable." 
 
 "I knew you would say so!" she 
 exclaimed. "It's true. All of my an- 
 cestors were sea captains. It was their 
 blood pounding in his veins like the 
 [140] 
 
THE SHADOW ON THE SCREEN 
 
 v/aves on the seashore that called him. 
 I know it was. I tried to tell John so. 
 Oh," she cried, "if he only could have 
 believed it." She paused for a moment, 
 and I thought she would cry, but she 
 regained control of herself with an 
 effort, and made a half-hearted little 
 attempt to smile. 
 
 "From the time Sam first began to 
 walk," she continued,- "there was no 
 interest in his life but boats. He sailed 
 little boats in the bath tub; he would 
 spend all day long down at the little 
 brook that ran through the meadow by 
 our house. Once he ran away and was 
 gone two days and when we found him 
 at last he said he had decided to be 
 a sailor. That was when he was only 
 seven. 
 
 "His father couldn't understand. The 
 Marshalls for generations had never 
 seen any water larger than Lake Erie. 
 His father and grandfather had lived 
 in the same house in Haydensburg; he 
 [141] 
 
THE SHADOW ON THE SCREEN 
 
 couldn't realize that five generations of 
 sea-rovers were calling to my boy — he 
 thought it was just perverseness. 
 
 "And Sammy tried — oh, so hard. 
 He worked at his lessons and at night 
 he would sit and try to be interested in 
 the plans that his father had for the 
 business. But I could see the little 
 worry lines in his face that meant he 
 had to drive himself to it. His heart 
 was far away, and it made my soul 
 sick to think of it. 
 
 "Something had to happen, of course, 
 for as he grew older he developed a will 
 as strong almost as his father's. There 
 had to be a conflict sometime, and one 
 Saturday night it came. School had 
 closed for the spring vacation. He came 
 bounding in at night, his face glowing, 
 to tell us that with three other boys he 
 had planned a canoe trip to last a week. 
 His father had wanted to have him 
 spend the week at the store. Both of 
 them were tired and impatient, and so 
 [142] 
 
THE SHADOW ON THE SCREEN 
 
 in spite of anything that I could do the 
 quarrel came. Next morning when I 
 went to knock at his door there was no 
 answer." She pressed her handkerchief 
 to her eyes, and it was several minutes 
 before she spoke again. 
 
 "That was six years ago," she said. 
 "I have not seen him nor heard from 
 him since. I have managed to live 
 through it somehow" — she forced a 
 wan little smile — "but it was too much 
 for his father. He never realized how 
 much the boy meant in his life until 
 — until he went out of it. For a year 
 he did everything that could be thought 
 of to find some trace, and when every- 
 thing failed, when there was no more 
 hope, he seemed to lose his grip on life. 
 You see," she faltered, "he thought — 
 that — Sam was dead." 
 
 She buried her face in her hands for 
 a moment, and then threw it back 
 almost defiantly. 
 
 "But it isn't true," she exclaimed 
 [143] 
 
THE SHADOW ON THE SCREEN 
 
 determinedly; "he is alive; he will 
 come back to me. Every night since 
 he went away I have lit the lamp for 
 him in the window; he will come back!" 
 She rose and, carried away by the stress 
 of her emotion, crossed the room and 
 grasped me by the arm. "Doctor, you 
 are a man of God. Tell me — tell me 
 that he will come back — " 
 
 I pulled her gently down upon the 
 old haircloth sofa beside me and spoke 
 very quietly, for she was on the point 
 of a breakdown: 
 
 "Your own heart tells you that he 
 will come back, doesn't it.^" I asked. 
 
 "Yes, yes," she cried, "I know it." 
 
 "Then I know it, too," I answered, 
 "for remember this, Mrs. Marshall: 
 God is love, and motherhood is love; 
 both are parts of the same immortal 
 spirit. And the heart of a mother is 
 nearer to the heart of God than any- 
 thing else in this world. Your own 
 heart, you say, tells you that he will 
 [ 144 ] 
 
THE SHADOW ON THE SCREEN 
 
 come back. I tell you that it is God 
 speaking to your heart. Your boy will 
 return to you — and I shall pray every 
 day that it may be soon." 
 
 She did not try to thank me. She 
 sat very still for a few minutes, and 
 when she lifted her head she was her 
 own controlled self again. She stepped 
 over to the bookcase in the corner and 
 taking down an old Bible brought it 
 to me. 
 
 "The last time our minister in Hay- 
 densburg called," she said, "he took the 
 Bible and glanced at the first page 
 where it opened and gave me a memory 
 verse. There it is." I followed the 
 direction of her gesture and saw framed 
 on the wall this verse: 
 
 Trust in the Lord and do good; so 
 shalt thou dwell in the land and verily 
 thou shalt be fed, 
 
 "It's been a wonderful comfort to 
 me," she said, "for there were times 
 after the store was sold when I wasn't 
 [ 145] 
 
THE SHADOW ON THE SCREEN 
 
 always sure of being fed. But it's time 
 for me to have a new verse," she con- 
 tinued; ** won't you open the Book and 
 read me one from the first page you 
 turn to?" 
 
 I opened the Bible at random, and 
 glancing at the page as she had asked 
 read to her: 
 
 And at evening time it shall be light. 
 
 "That is your verse," I said. "There's 
 your light in the window at eventide 
 for your boy, and some night God will 
 flash the light of his love and reveal 
 him to you. Remember — in the 
 troubled times, when things look darkest 
 — remember at evening time it shall 
 be light." 
 
 "Thank you a thousand times, 
 Doctor," she cried. 
 
 And so we left her comforted. 
 
 Every Sunday morning she was in 
 
 her place under the gallery, though it 
 
 must have taken her an hour at least 
 
 to come; and one Wednesday evening 
 
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THE SHADOW ON THE SCREEN 
 
 I was surprised to find her at the prayer 
 meeting. She lingered after the others 
 had gone; I could see that she wanted 
 to speak to me. Indeed, she seemed 
 hardly able to contain herself until we 
 were alone in my study. 
 
 "Oh, Doctor," she burst out, "such 
 a wonderful thing has happened!" 
 
 "He has come home.'^" I said. 
 
 "No, not yet," she responded, her 
 enthusiasm dampened just a trifle. "He 
 hasn't come yet, but he's coming. This 
 month he's coming. God has promised 
 it to me." 
 
 "Tell me about it," I said quietly. 
 
 "It was last night. I was asleep, and 
 suddenly I saw him as plainly as I see 
 you here. I seemed to be in darkness, 
 until all at once a glow of light came 
 from above and there he was in the 
 middle of it — my Sam, my boy. He 
 has grown older and his shoulders have 
 broadened out but his features haven't 
 changed a bit. He had on sailor clothes 
 [147] 
 
THE SHADOW ON THE SCREEN 
 
 as though he had come home from a 
 long journey. I reached out my hands 
 to him and cried, and just then I heard 
 a voice, as clear as could be. *Have 
 faith,' it said. 'At evening time it 
 shall be light.' Oh, Doctor, you be- 
 lieve it, don't you.^ Tell me. Doctor, 
 that you believe it." 
 
 What could I say.^ I answered her 
 with all the assurance I could command 
 and walked with her to the street car. 
 But all the way home I found myself 
 wondering at the second sight that is 
 sometimes the gift of God to mothers, 
 and praying earnestly that in the case of 
 the Widow Marshall the vision which her 
 faith had brought her might prove 
 true. 
 
 Saturday morning I received a little 
 note written in her quaint, old-fashioned 
 hand, apparently on the other half of 
 the sheet of paper on which she had 
 written us before. The vision, she said, 
 had come to her again; she knew now 
 [148] 
 
THE SHADOW ON THE SCREEN 
 
 that God had heard and would answer 
 our prayers. She was very happy. Sun- 
 day morning I saw her at a distance, but 
 there was little time to think of her or 
 of anybody else, for that evening I was 
 to give the first of my series of talks on 
 the Life of Christ, illustrated with 
 lantern slides, and I left immediately 
 after the morning service to prepare 
 for it. 
 
 The church was packed that night. 
 Stereopticon slides, and particularly col- 
 ored slides, were a far greater novelty 
 in those days than they are now. The 
 lantern was in the gallery and the screen, 
 which was a large one, hung clear 
 across the choir loft behind the pulpit. 
 I began with a map of Galilee, showed 
 pictures of the birth in the manger and 
 the flight into Egypt, and then some 
 scenes in modern Nazareth, accompany- 
 ing the slides with a description of the 
 experiences and habits which must have 
 made up the boyhood of Jesus. So 
 [149] 
 
THE SHADOW ON THE SCREEN 
 
 far as was possible, I told the story in 
 the words of the Gospel narrative, and 
 the effect must have been both vivid 
 and impressive, for the audience sat in 
 perfect silence. 
 
 We came at length to the baptism 
 in the river Jordan: 
 
 "'And Jesus, when he was baptised,'" 
 I said, following Matthew's account, 
 "'went up straightway out of the 
 water—'" 
 
 I glanced at the screen, expecting 
 to see the picture of the baptism, but 
 instead the operator had projected a 
 scene belonging much later in the lec- 
 ture. He realized his mistake instantly 
 and withdrew the slide, while I went 
 on with the narrative: 
 
 "'went up straightway out of the 
 water, and lo, a voice — '" 
 
 At that instant, when the screen was 
 
 blank, a man rose in front of the lantern 
 
 in the gallery, so that his head intercepted 
 
 the light and his silhouette was thrown 
 
 [150] 
 
THE SHADOW ON THE SCREEN 
 
 with perfect sharpness on the gleaming 
 circle in the middle of the screen. 
 
 The shadow was there only an instant, 
 for the man immediately dropped back 
 into his seat and the operator flashed 
 on the screen the baptism picture. But 
 in that moment the congregation was 
 startled by a piercing cry from under 
 the gallery. 
 
 *'My son, my boy! Oh, Sammy, 
 my boy!" said the voice. 
 
 Then there was a more general cry of: 
 
 "Lights! Turn on the lights!" 
 
 I thought I recognized the voice. 
 "Turn on a light," I said firmly. "Let 
 everyone remain perfectly quiet." 
 
 An usher in the rear snapped on one 
 of the electric lights and, looking in that 
 direction, I saw the Widow Marshall 
 rushing for the gallery door. Two or 
 three men left their seats and followed, 
 attempting to quiet her, but an army 
 would not have succeeded. 
 
 "Sammy!" she called, "Your mother 
 [151] 
 
THE SHADOW ON THE SCREEN 
 
 is coming for you, Sammy." She 
 seemed to have cleared the stairway in 
 a single bound, for before I quite realized 
 what had happened she was in the gal- 
 lery. Following the light of the stere- 
 opticon down to the front row of seats, 
 she threw her arms about the neck of 
 the tall young man whose shadow had 
 appeared upon the screen. 
 
 The congregation was in a furor of 
 excitement. Men stood up; women, 
 restless in the dark, whispered shrilly 
 to each other. I stepped to the front 
 of the platform, and shouted out into 
 the darkness : 
 
 ** Let no one leave his seat. The lights 
 will be turned on in a moment. The 
 lecture will be continued next Sunday 
 night, but this service will be closed now 
 with the benediction. You have seen 
 a greater sermon than your ears will 
 ever hear. You have seen the answer 
 of many prayers, and the dead returned 
 to life." 
 
 [152] 
 
THE SHADOW ON THE SCREEN 
 
 While the congregation was composing 
 itself for the benediction I sent an usher 
 to bring the Widow Marshall and her 
 boy to my study, and there after a few 
 minutes I found them both, their faces 
 smiling through their tears. 
 
 "He has come back!" cried the Widow 
 Marshall, pushing the big, fine-featured 
 lad forward until he nearly fell into my 
 arms. "Oh, Doctor, the vision, is ful- 
 filled. At evening time there was 
 light." 
 
 He told her that night about his wan- 
 derings and why his letters had not 
 reached her and how he had gone back 
 to Haydensburg and from there had 
 traced her to the city. All day he had 
 tramped about through the unfamiliar 
 city streets, and, drawn by the lights 
 and the music, he had at length wand- 
 ered into the church. It was very late 
 before the story ended and I pressed 
 them both to come to our house for the 
 night rather than undertake the long 
 [153 1 
 
THE SHADOW ON THE SCREEN 
 
 ride home. But the Widow Marshall 
 would not have it so. 
 
 "The light is burning for Sammy in 
 the window," she said. "I want him to 
 come home and blow it out." 
 
 [ 154