He laughed protestingly. "Oh, I'm not a prophet, Aunt Bell—I've learned that."
"But you could be, with proper managing. There's that perfectly stunning beginning with that wild healing-chap in the far West. As it is now, you make nothing of it—it might have happened to anybody and it never came to anything, except that you went off into the wilderness and stayed alone. You should tell how you fasted with him in a desert, and how he told you secrets and imparted his healing power to you. Then get the reporters about you and talk queerly so that they can make a good story of it. Also live on rice and speak with an accent—any kind of accent would make you more interesting, Bernal. Then preach your message, and I'd guarantee you a following of thousands in New York in a month. Of course they'd leave you for the next fellow that came along with a key to the book of Revelations, or a new diet or something, but you'd keep them a while."
Aunt Bell paused, enthusiastic, but somewhat out of breath.
"I'll quit, Aunt Bell—that's enough——"
"Mr. Spencer is an example for you. Contrast his hold on the masses with Mrs. Eddy's, who appeals to the imagination. I'm told by those who have read his works that he had quite the knack of logic, and yet the President of Princeton Theological Seminary preaches a sermon in which he calls him 'the greatest failure of the age.' I read it in this morning's paper. His text was, 'Ye believe in God, believe also in me.' You see, there was an appeal to the imagination—the most audacious appeal that the world has ever known —and the crowd will be with this clergyman who uses it to refute the arguments of a man who worked hard through forty years of ill-health to get at the mere dry common-sense of things. If Jesus had descended to logic, he'd never have made a convert. But he appealed magnificently to the imagination, and see the result!"
His mind had been dwelling on Allan's trouble, but now he came back to his gracious adviser.
"You do me good, Aunt Bell—you've taken all that message nonsense out of me. I suppose I could be one of them, you know—one of those fellows that get into trouble—if I saw it was needed; but it isn't. Let the men who can't help it do it—they have no choice. Hereafter I shall worry as little about the world's salvation as I do about my own."
When they had finished dinner he let it be known that he was not a little anxious concerning a message that was late in arriving, and he made it a point, indeed, that the maid should advise Mrs. Linford to this effect, with an inquiry whether she might not have seen the delayed missive.
Then, after a word with Allan, he went to his room and from his south window smoked into the night— smoked into something approaching quietude a mind that had been rebelliously running back to the bare-armed girl in dusky white—the wondering, waiting girl whose hand had trembled into his so long ago—so many years during which he had been a dreaming fool, forgetting the world to worship certain impalpable gods of idealism—forgetting a world in which it was the divinely sensible custom to eat one's candy cane instead of preserving it superstitiously through barren years!
He knew that he had awakened too late for more than a fleeting vision of what would have made his life full. Now he must be off, up the path again, this time knowing certainly that the woman would never more stand waiting and wondering at the end, to embitter his renunciations. The woman was definitely gone. That was something, even though she went with that absurd, unreasoning, womanish suspicion. And he had one free, dear look from her to keep through the empty days.