member of the small congregation. There was no sermon and the service
was short, and as he sat quietly in his place, Coryndon wondered what
frenzied moment of fear or despair could have driven this man into the
company of Joicey and Mrs. Draycott Wilder, unconscious perhaps of their
connection with him, but linked nevertheless by an invisible thread that
wound around them all.

Beyond the fact that he had seen Mrs. Wilder, he had not taken her under
the close observation of his mental microscope. She stood on one side
until such time as he should have need to probe into her reasons for
silence, and he wondered if Hartley was right, and if, by chance, the
earnest face of the clergyman, with its burning, stricken eyes, had
appealed to her sympathy. Could it be so, he asked himself once or
twice, but the immediate question was the one that Coryndon gave his
mind to answer, and just then he was forming an impression of the Rev.
Francis Heath.

He looked at his hands, at his thin neck, at the hollows in his cheeks
and the emotional quiver at the corner of his mouth, and he knew the man
was a fanatic, a civilized fanatic, but desperately and even horribly in
earnest. A believer in torment, a man who held the vigorous faith that
makes for martyrdom and can also pile wood for the fires that burn the
bodies of others for the eventual welfare of their souls.
Unquestionably, the Rev. Francis Heath was a man not to be judged by an
average inch rule, and Coryndon thought over him as he listened to his
voice and watched his strained, tempest-tossed face. Whether he was
involved in the disappearance of Absalom or not, he recognized that
Heath was a strong man, and that his ill-balanced force would need very
little to make him a violent man. It surprised him less to think that
Hartley attached suspicion to the Rector of St. Jude's than it had at