and found his footsteps leading him, as if by a kind of instinct of their own, down one of the short side streets to where the waters of the Bay lapped soothingly against the sea-wall.
But the Bay zephyrs could not wash that series of vivid experiences, half-ghastly and half-inspiring, out of mind.
He had blundered, all unprepared, into the presence of death. His sense of the fitness of things revolted. He was unworthy—unable—unclean. He—a book agent! a rate clerk! an actor! who had held Marien Dounay in his arms and felt his body thrill at the beating of her heart!
Yet this old woman had called him a minister of God! This Gloom Woman too had called him the same. Minister! Minister! What was it? Minister meant to serve. A servant of God! But he had not served God! At least not consciously. He had only served humanity a little. He had served the old woman as a prop to her fears, like an anchor to her soul when she drifted out into the deeper running tide that ebbs but never floods. He had served the Gloom Woman when he stood beside her while she opened the tear-gates of her grief.
It was very little! Yet that much he had really served. To reflect upon it now gave him a sense of elation greater than when he had beaten Scofield and his tariff department; greater than when he had quelled the mob at the People's; greater than when he had crushed Marien in his arms like a flower; greater even than when Bessie had looked her love into his eyes.
He began to perceive that his life was surely mounting from one plane to another and reflected that he had reached the highest plane of all to-day when the Angel of the Chair had pinned upon his coat the badge of Holy Orders; when this other saint, sinking into the dark tide, had hailed him a minister of God! Highest of all, when
