The rapid _résumé_ was but an impassioned appeal. Its answer came
after a minute; to the torrent of eager words, three words:

"Thank you, Dick."

The absolute lack of impression on the man's judgment was plain.

"Ah!" The clergyman sprang to his feet and stood, his eyes blazing,
despairing, looking down at the bent, listless figure. How could he let
a human being suffer as this one was suffering? Quickly his thoughts
shifted their basis. He could not affect the mind of the lawyer; might
he reach now, perhaps, the soul of the man? He knew the difficulty,
for before this his belief had crossed swords with the agnosticism of
his uncle, an agnosticism shared by his father, in which he had been
trained, from which he had broken free only five years before. He had
faced the batteries of the two older brains at that time, and come out
with the brightness of his new-found faith untarnished, but without, he
remembered, scratching the armor of their profound doubt in everything.
One could see, looking at the slender black figure, at the visionary
gaze of the gray wide eyes, at the shape of the face, broad-browed,
ovalled, that this man's psychic make-up must lift him like wings into
an atmosphere outside a material, outside even an intellectual world.
He could breathe freely only in a spiritual air, and things hard to
believe to most human beings were, perhaps, his every-day thoughts. He
caught a quick breath of excitement as it flashed to his brain that now,
possibly, was coming the moment when he might justify his life, might
help this man whom he loved, to peace. The breath he caught was a
prayer; his strong, nervous fingers trembled. He spoke in a tone whose
concentration lifted the eyes below him, that brooded, stared.