“I told pastor,” she murmured, “that night, that I was not sure of myself. I am no nearer being sure of myself now than I was then.”
The scene with Hammond rose up before her, and she added: “I am less sure, I think, than ever!”
She gazed fixedly where the double line of lamps gleamed on the near-distant bridge. For a moment she tried to compare the two lives—that of an American Methodist pastor’s wife, with endless possibilities of doing good, and that of the wife of a comparatively wealthy newspaper editor-manager.
“Should I like to marry a popular man?” she asked herself. “I read somewhere once that popular men, like popular actors, make bad husbands, that they cannot endure the tameness of an audience of one.”
She laughed low, and a little amusedly, as she added, “Oh, well, Tom Hammond has not asked me to marry him. Perhaps he never will—and—well, ‘sufficient for the day is the evil thereof.’ Pastor once preached from that, I remember.”
The night had grown cooler. She shivered a little as she rose and passed into the lighted room beyond.
Two hours later, as she laid her head upon the pillow, she murmured, “I don’t see how I could marry the pastor! Why, I haven’t ‘got religion’ yet. I am not ‘converted,’ as these Britishers would say!”
CHAPTER IX.
A THREAT.
Tom Hammond paused before the house that bore the number at the head of Mrs. Joyce’s letter. It was in a mean street, and his soul went out in pity towards the unfortunate woman, who, with all her refinement, was compelled to live amid such squalid surroundings.