"Betty!" he gasped; "tell your father I can't see him. Not now.—I'll be back later.—Perhaps in a little while.—Later."
She put out her arms to him.
"What is it, Luke?" she cried. "What's the matter?"
His eyes looked at her, but he did not see her. He turned from her to the street.
"I don't know," he said, "but I think—I think I'm Being Saved."
CHAPTER XVII
§1. For an hour, for two hours, he tried to adjust his mental and spiritual sight to the blazing illumination; but adjustment, he at length realized, must be a matter of many days. The illumination was too sudden and too intense. He could no more assess moral values and determine ethical duties than a new-born baby can know the use of those objects most habitual to its elders—a new-born baby to whom the lamp on a table and the moon in the sky are one and the same. There must be false starts on wrong roads; there must be disappointment and stumbling; there must even be moments of relapse. The great thing for Luke was that, as the lives of some men are changed forever for the better by an affirmation of faith, his life had now forever been changed for the better by a rejection of faith. He had denied the superhuman in man's affairs, and the banishment of the superhuman raised the human; it left the man no longer a pigmy trembling before a giant, but himself a giant, limited and mortal, yet self-sufficient and divine. He had found what was for him the ultimate strength; for the knowledge of how to use that strength rightly he could wait.
Meanwhile, there was the patent obligation to Forbes. Forbes needed him; Luke returned to the Forbes house.
§2. Forbes was waiting in the library.
"Where were you yesterday? Are you going crazy, Huber? You knew I needed you."