He read the lines over and over again, and gave a deep, heart-broken
sigh, bending his face between his hands, and bowing his shoulders as
though under a heavy weight. His gaunt frame was thin and spare, his
black alpaca coat hung on it like a sack, and his whole attitude spoke
of sorrow. He might have been the presentment of an unwilling ghost, who
stood with the Ferryman's farthing under his palm, waiting to be taken
across the cheerless, dark waters to a limbo of drifting souls. He took
his hands from before his face and clasped them over the book, looking
out of the window to the evening shadows, as if he tried to find peace
in the very act of contemplation.

The sad things he came in daily contact with had conquered his faith in
life, though they had not succeeded in killing his trust in God's
eventual plan of redemption; and his mind wandered in terrible places,
places he had forced his way into, places he could never forget. He
suffered from all a reformer's agony, an agony that is the small
reflection of the great story of the mystic burden heavy as the sins of
the whole world, and he tried, out of the simple, childlike fancy of the
words he read, to grasp at a better mind.

Heath was one of those men who could not understand effortless faith; he
was crushed by his own lack of success, and bowed down by his own
failure. Since he could not rout the enemy single-handed, he believed
that the battle was against the Hosts of the Lord. He knew no leisure
from the war of his own thoughts, and as he clasped his hands, his face
grew tense and set, and his eyes haggard and terrible. For a moment he
sat very still, and his eyes followed the lines written by a man who had
the faith of a little child: