thought himself superior to the thin-lipped man who talked with him and
had he been able to express what was in his heart he might have said,
"Look here, man! I am made of different stuff from all the people there at
the church. I am new clay to be moulded into a new man. Not even my mother
is like me. I do not accept your ideas of life just because you say they
are good any more than I accept Windy McPherson just because he happens to
be my father."

During one winter Sam spent evening after evening reading the Bible in his
room. It was after Kate's marriage--she had got into an affair with a
young farmer that had kept her name upon the tongues of whisperers for
months but was now a housewife on a farm at the edge of a village some
miles from Caxton, and the mother was again at her endless task among the
soiled clothes in the kitchen and Windy McPherson off drinking and
boasting about town. Sam read the book in secret. He had a lamp on a
little stand beside his bed and a novel, lent him by John Telfer, beside
it. When his mother came up the stairway he slipped the Bible under the
cover of the bed and became absorbed in the novel. He thought it something
not quite in keeping with his aims as a business man and a money getter to
be concerned about his soul. He wanted to conceal his concern but with all
his heart wanted to get hold of the message of the strange book, about
which men wrangled hour after hour on winter evenings in the store.

He did not get it; and after a time he stopped reading the book. Left to
himself he might have sensed its meaning, but on all sides of him were the
voices of the men--the men at Wildman's who owned to no faith and yet were
filled with dogmatisms as they talked behind the stove in the grocery; the
brown-bearded, thin-lipped minister in the brick church; the shouting,
pleading evangelists who came to visit the town in the winter; the gentle
old grocer who talked vaguely of the spirit world,--all these voices were