Some of the most scurrilous paragraphs ever penned appeared in his enemy’s columns that morning. It is true that the identity of the man slandered (Tom Hammond) was veiled, but so thinly—so devilishly—that every journalist, and a myriad other readers, would know against whom the scurrilous utterances were hurled.
Tom Hammond would not have been human if the reading of the paragraphs had not hurt him. And he would not have been “partaker of the Divine nature,” as he now was, if he had not found a balm in the committal of his soreness to God.
“That is the work of that fellow Joyce,” he told himself.
Twenty-four hours before, if this utterance had had to have been made by him, he would have said,
“That beast Joyce!” But already, as a young soldier of Christ, the promised watch was set upon his lips. In the strength of the two great loves that had come into his life—the love of Christ and the love of Zillah Robart—the scurrilous paragraphs affected him comparatively little.
When he had skimmed the papers, attended to his correspondence, and to one or two other special items, he took pen and paper and began to write to his betrothed.
His pen flew over the smooth surface of the paper, but his thoughts were even quicker than his pen. His whole being palpitated with love. It was the love of his highest ideal. The love which he had sometimes dared to hope might some day be his, but which he had scarcely dared to expect.
The memory of his passing fancy for Madge Finisterre crossed his mind, once, as he wrote. He paused with the pen poised in his fingers, and smiled that he should ever have thought it possible that he was beginning to love her. “I liked her, admired her,” he mused. “I enjoyed her frank, open friendship, but love her—no, no. The word cannot be named in the same breath as my feeling for Zillah.”
He put his pen to the paper again, and poured out all the wealth of the love of his heart to his beautiful betrothed. When he had finally finished the letter, he sent it by special messenger to Zillah.
He had not forgotten that Major H——’s second meeting was that day. Three o’clock found him again in the hall. This time it was quite full. There was a new sense of interest, of understanding, present within him as he entered the place. This time he bowed his head in real prayer.