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 AVE WILKINS caught the gleam of the sun on the spire of the church across the river, and his dry smile had in it a touch of bitterness. It was the men who had reared that spire, pointing like the needle of a compass to heaven, who were depriving him of his boy—the boy he had grown to love…. It was he, an agnostic, doomed by those spire-builders to eternal damnation, who was concerning himself with the soul of that lad—a soul which he could not bring himself to believe was immortal. He saw the irony of it, that he, who could not accept Christianity, was compelled to the practice of it in its concrete form.

“If,” he said to himself, “there is a God, he must be amused.”

He rested his hand on Angus Burke’s shoulder, and at his touch the boy looked up into his eyes with a sudden brightening of his face that made Dave wince.

“Why,” he reflected, “must grief so often be the consequence of doing the right thing?”