"I suppose I'll have to hear it; go on."
"I was always told in my youth that when an opportunity to do good offered one should seize upon it at once. No hesitation, no trifling! Only a few years ago I wandered into a little church in a hill town of Massachusetts where I waited for the Boston Express. It was a beautiful Sunday evening—I shall never forget it!" he sighed. "I am uncertain whether I was led thither by good impulse, or only because the pews were more comfortable than the benches at the railway station. I arrived early and an usher seated me up front near a window and gave me an armful of books and a pamphlet on foreign missions. Other people began to come in pretty soon; and then I heard a lot of giggling and a couple of church pillars began chasing a stray dog up and down the aisles. I was placing my money on the taller pillar; he had the best reach of leg, and, besides, the other chap had side whiskers, which are not good for sprinting,—they offer just so much more resistance to the wind. The unseemliness of the thing offended my sense of propriety. The sound of the chase broke in harshly upon my study of Congo missions. After much pursuing the dog sought refuge between my legs. I picked him up tenderly in my arms and dropped him gently, Donovan, gently, from the window. Now wasn't that seizing an opportunity when you found it, so to speak, underfoot?"
"No doubt of it at all. Hurry with the rest of it, Buttons!"
"Well, that pup fell with a sickening yelp through a skylight into the basement where the choir was vesting itself, and hit a bishop—actually struck a young and promising bishop who had never done anything to me. They got the constable and made a horrible row, and besides paying for the skylight I had to give the church a new organ to square myself with the bishop, who was a friend of a friend of mine in Kentucky who once gave me a tip on the Derby. Since then the very thought of foreign missions makes me ill, I always hear that dog—it was the usual village mongrel of evil ancestry—crashing through the skylight. What's doing this morning, Irishman?"
I linked my arm in his and led the way toward Glenarm House. There was much to be done before I could bring together the warring members of the house of Holbrook, and Gillespie could, I felt, be relied on in emergencies. He broke forth at once.
"I want to see her—I've got to see her!"
"Who—Helen? Then you'll have to wait a while, for she's gone for a paddle or a gallop, I'm not sure which, and won't be back for a couple of hours. But you have grown too daring. Miss Pat is still here, and you can't expect me to arrange meetings for you every day in the year."
"I've got to see her," he repeated, and his tone was utterly joyless. "I don't understand her, Donovan."
"Man is not expected to understand woman, my dear Buttons. At the casino last night everything was as gay as an octogenarian's birthday cake."
He stopped in the shadow of the house and seized my arm.