"The great courage that is worth while before God," his mother used to
say, "is the courage to run away from the temptation to be unclean. It
is the only time you have the right to be a coward. That sort of
cowardice is _true courage_."

Besides her sweet face, that advice was the great shining memory he had
of his mother, and when he began to wander and meet temptations, he
found himself treasuring it as his best and dearest memory of her.
True, he had missed her religion--had lost what little he had had of
it--but he had kept her talisman to a clean life.

His lack of religion worried him, though he had really never known much
about his family's form of it. For that his mother's death, early
boarding school, and his father's worse than indifference, were
responsible. But as he grew older he felt vaguely that he had missed
something the quality of which he had but tasted through the one
admonition of his mother that he had treasured. His nature was full of
reverence. His soul burned to respond to the call of faith, but
something rebelled. He had read everything, and was humble enough to
acknowledge that he knew little. He had given up the struggle to
believe. Nothing seemed satisfactory. It worried him to think that he
had reached such a conclusion, but he was consoled by the thought that
many men had been of his way of thinking. He hoped this would prove
excuse enough, but found it was not excuse enough for him. Here he
was, rich, noble, with the English scales of caste off his eyes, doing
nothing, indolent, loving only a memory, indifferent but still seeing a
saving something of his mother and his child love in every woman to
whom he spoke.

Now something else, yet something not so very different, had suddenly