Now, when he met them at Sunday breakfast, he held out the telegrams, and the two women elbowed each other to read them.
“Oh, my dear, I am so glad and proud!” cried Cleo; and Elmer’s mother—she was an old woman, and bent; very wretched she looked as she mumbled, “Oh, forgive me, my boy! I’ve been as wicked as that Dowler woman!”
VI
But for all that, would his congregation believe him?
If they jeered when he faced them, he would be ruined, he would still lose the Yorkville pastorate and the Napap. Thus he fretted in the quarter-hour before morning service, pacing his study and noting through the window—for once, without satisfaction—that hundreds on hundreds were trying to get into the crammed auditorium.
His study was so quiet. How he missed Hettie’s presence!
He knelt. He did not so much pray as yearn inarticulately. But this came out clearly: “I’ve learned my lesson. I’ll never look at a girl again. I’m going to be the head of all the moral agencies in the country—nothing can stop me, now I’ve got the Napap!—but I’m going to be all the things I want other folks to be! Never again!”
He stood at his study door, watching the robed choir filing out to the auditorium chanting. He realized how he had come to love the details of his church; how, if his people betrayed him now, he would miss it: the choir, the pulpit, the singing, the adoring faces.
It had come. He could not put it off. He had to face them.
Feebly the Reverend Dr. Gantry wavered through the door to the auditorium and exposed himself to twenty-five hundred question marks.