St. John, in one of the pauses of the conversation, looked up and saw this striking head and face opposite to him; a head reminding him of some of those saintly portraitures of holy women in which Overbeck delights. We have described him as peculiarly impressible under actual social influences. It was only the week before that an application had been made to him for one Sibyl Selwyn to hold a meeting in his little chapel, and sternly refused. His idea of a female preacher had been largely blended with the mediæval masculine contempt of woman and his horror of modern woman public teachers and lecturers. When this serene vision rose like an exhalation before him, he did not at first recall the applicant for his chapel, but he looked at her admiringly in a sort of dazed wonder, and inquired of Dr. Campbell in a low voice, "Who is that?"
"Oh," said Dr. Campbell, "don't you know? that's the Quaker preacher, Sibyl Selwyn; the woman who has faced and put down the devil in places where you couldn't and I wouldn't go."
St. John felt the blood flush in his cheeks, and a dim idea took possession of him that, if some had entertained angels unawares, others unawares had rejected them.
"Yes," said Dr. Campbell, "that woman has been alone, at midnight, through places where you and I could not go without danger of our heads; and she has said words to bar-tenders and brothel-keepers that would cost us our lives. But she walks out of it all, as calm as you see her to-night. I know that kind of woman—I was brought up among them. They are an interesting physiological study; the over-cerebration of the spiritual faculties among them occasions some very peculiar facts and phenomena. I should like to show you a record I have kept. It gives them at times an almost miraculous ascendancy over others. I fancy," he said carelessly, "that your legends of the saints could furnish a good many facts of the same sort."
At this moment, Eva came up in her authoritative way as mistress of ceremonies, took Mr. St. John by the arm, and, walking across with him, seated him by Sibyl Selwyn, introduced them to each other, and left them. St. John was embarrassed, but Sibyl received him with the perfect composure in which she sat enthroned.
"Arthur St. John," she said, "I am glad to meet thee. I am interested in thy work among the poor of this quarter, and have sought the Lord for thee in it."
"I am sure I thank you," said St. John, thus suddenly reduced to primitive elements and spoken to on the simple plane of his unvarnished humanity. It is seldom, after we come to mature years and have gone out into the world, that any one addresses us simply by our name without prefix or addition of ceremony. It is the province only of rarest intimacy or nearest relationship, and it was long since St. John had been with friend or relation who could thus address him. It took him back to childhood and his mother's knee. He was struggling with a vague sense of embarrassment, when he remembered the curt and almost rude manner in which he had repelled her overture to speak in his chapel, and the contempt he had felt for her at the time. In the presence of the clear, saintly face, it seemed as if he had been unconsciously guilty of violating a shrine. He longed to apologize, but he did not know how to begin.
"I feel," he said, "that I am inexperienced and that the work is very great. You," he added, "have had longer knowledge of it than I; perhaps I might learn something of you."
"Thou wilt be led," said Sibyl, with the same assured calmness, "be not afraid."