this Gloom Woman, out of her soul's Gethsemane, had wrung his hand and kissed it so purely and also hailed him as Minister of God!
For some weeks the little chapel in Encina, its troubles and its troubled members, continued to exercise a strange fascination over John. Each Sunday he shepherded the Sunday school and talked a blundering quarter of an hour to the older folk who gathered; while between Sundays he devoted an astonishing portion of his time to visiting these wrangling Christians in their homes, for the ambition to heal this disgraceful quarrel had taken hold on him like some knightly passion.
And in the midst of all these busy comings and goings, odd, half-humorous reflections upon his own status used to break in upon John's mind. Not a self-respecting church in the communion, he knew, but would have eyed him askance because he had been an actor. Only this little helpless church, whose condition was so miserable it could not reject any real help, accepted him; and that merely in a relation that was entirely unofficial and undefined. Still a sense of his fitness for this particular task grew upon him continually; and it was really astonishing how every experience through which he had passed had equipped him for his peacemaker task: most of all those pangs endured because of his break with Bessie, which, although eating into his heart like an acid, yielded a kind of ascetic joy in the pain as if some sort of character bleaching and expiation were at work within him.
In the meantime, an arbitration committee consisting of the District Evangelist, Brother Harding, and Professor Hamilton, the Dean of the Seminary, was at work upon the affairs of the little church. Both wings consented to this, but with misgivings, since the one man they were really coming to trust was Hampstead himself; and when
