Before the big leather chair he fell upon his knees, burying his head in his arms.
"Oh, good Father,'" said Brown, just above his breath, "only Thou canst help me through this thing. It's even harder than I thought it would be. I want the old life, I want the old love—my heart is weak within me at the thought of giving them up…. I know the temptation comes not from without but from within. It's my own weak self that is my enemy, not the lure of the life I'm giving up…. Give me strength—fighting strength…. Help me—'not to give in while I can stand and see.'"
Presently he rose to his feet. He was pale, but in his face showed the renewed strength of purpose he had asked for. He set about the task of packing the few things he meant to take with him, working with a certain unhurried efficiency which accomplished no small amount in that hour before luncheon. Then he descended to find his sister's car waiting for him, and was whirled away.
XIII
BROWN'S TRIAL BY FLOOD
At nine o'clock that night, feeling a little as if he were in some sort of familiar dream, Brown, wearing evening dress for the first time in more than a year, sat looking about him. He was at Mrs. Brainard's right hand, in the post of the guest of honour, for Mrs. Brainard was playing hostess for her bachelor friend, Webb Atchison, in the apartment of the princely up-town hotel which was his more or less permanent home.
About the great round table were gathered a goodly company—the company of Brown's old friends among the rich and eminent of the city. Not only men of great wealth, but men distinguished in their professions, noted for their achievements, and honoured for their public services, were among those hurriedly asked to do this man honour. They had all been more or less constant members of his congregation during the years when he was making a name as the most forceful and fearless young preacher who ever ventured to tell the people of aristocratic St. Timothy's what he thought of them.
And they were gathered to-night to tell him what they thought of him. They were sparing no pains to do so. More than once, while he parried their attacks upon his resolution to leave them permanently, parried them with a smiling face, with a resolute quiet voice, with the quickness of return thrust for which he was famous in debate, he was inwardly sending up one oft-repeated, pregnant petition: "Lord, help me through this—for Thy sake!"
They were not men alone who combined against him with every pressure of argument; there were women present who used upon him every art of persuasion. Not that of speech alone, but that subtler witchery of look and smile with which such women well know how to make their soft blows tell more surely than harder ones from other hands. Among these, all of whom were women of charm and distinction after one fashion or another, was one who alone, though she seemed to be making no direct attack, was waging the heaviest war of all against Donald Brown's determination.
Atchison, in arranging the places of his guests, had put Helena Forrest at Brown's right, at the sacrifice of his own pleasure, for by this concession she was farthest from himself. Whether or not he understood how peculiarly deadly was the weapon he thus used against his friend, he knew that Helena was capable of exerting a powerful influence upon any man—how should he himself not know it, who was at her feet? He had no compunction in bringing that influence to bear upon Brown at this moment, when the actual word of withdrawal had not yet been spoken.