Page:Stringer - Lonely O'Malley.djvu/218

 It was writing the like unto which Lonely had never before read, and he went on, from verse to verse, spellbound.

"If any man have an ear, let him hear."

"He that leadeth into captivity shall go into captivity: he that killeth with the sword must be killed with the sword. Here is the patience and the faith of the saints."

And he read on and on, unconscious of time and place, gasping over the seven angels with the seven plagues, quailing over the fall of Babylon, rejoicing over the chaining of the Dragon, and thrilling at the jeweled wealth of the new Jerusalem.

It was a fire-brand to the dry straw of his starved imagination. What seemed the waste acreage of his misspent youth, burning itself shamefacedly away, only added to the vital heat of the quick transformation.

He went back to the first of the book, and read it as carefully, yet emerged from it as dubiously uncertain as from the last of it. Some of the faint echoes of modern science had fallen on his inattentive young ears. The whispers of modern skepticism had crept absently into his preoccupied mind.