"A great man once prayed, 'Lord, help thou my unbelief,'" was the gentle
answer in which was that queer note of apostolic surety with which I
heard him address the woman in the garden that night.

"I can't pray--there's nothing there," I said in a very small voice that
I could scarcely recognize as my own. "Oh, I mean that we are all
floundering, and where can we get the lifeline? Where did you get the
line that you think will pull you out of the vortex?"

Then for a long moment he and I sat again involved in the emptiness of
the universe that Tristan's love song had opened for us, and I knew that
with ruthless feet I had entered his Holy of Holies and was being
allowed to stand across the threshold.

"Forgive me," I gasped.

"I never felt that I could tell it before," he said, slowly, and the
bounds of the emptiness retreated still further away as he turned so
that he sat facing me and again bent his dull gold head closer to mine.
In a second I knew why in my mind I had been calling him a Harpeth
jaguar. It was just my pictorial expression for the word freedom, the
freedom that comes from power. I knew that mentally and bodily I was
looking upon the first free man I had ever encountered, and I was
abashed.

"Don't tell me," I said, with a gentleness in my voice I had never heard
before, and that came from something that I felt to be strangely like
meekness, though I had never before met that emotion in myself.

"You know the romance of my father's life," the soft voice went on,