Page:Fidelia, (IA fidelia00balm).pdf/71

 living with the Lord, begin to break with him. While he was in the lighted, warm car of the train and surrounded by the ordinary, worldly, somewhat sleepy people on their way to the suburbs from the city, he maintained most of his defiance; but when he left the train, he happened to be alone, and alone made his way through the snow down dark, quiet streets.

He passed a row of small houses which lay between the tracks and the university neighborhood and he noticed one alight. While he approached it, the glare of motorcar headlights confronted him and an automobile labored through the snow to the little house where a man with a small satchel hurriedly got out.

"A doctor," Dave said to himself; and he saw a man waiting in the open doorway of the house and holding to the door nervously and anxiously. Dave got a glimpse of a woman gazing out an upper window and from her posture of awe and dread, he imagined that a child in that house had been taken seriously ill. He stopped and stared up at the house and there came to him an image from a Sunday-school card, which he had been given when a little boy and which illustrated the text from Exodus: "I will pass through the land and will smite the firstborn."

It pictured the Angel of Death hovering over a house; and Dave, standing there in the dark and the snow, imagined the Angel above this house and waiting, whether to pass on or to strike, not upon anything the hurried little man with the satchel might do, but waiting upon something far more fundamental than that. And suddenly Dave seemed to himself to be standing, not before this house, but be-