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284 whole thing off, and get back into harness as it were."

"Let me understand you," said the rector. "It is not because either of you think that I am in the wrong that you advocate surrender?"

"No," came the answer in unison.

"But because you believe it to be expedient?"

"Exactly," replied Barry. But Mrs. Bradley added:

"I am thinking of your family."

"I, too, have thought of my family," came the response. "We are all in God's hands. I have no doubt, if the worst should come to the worst, He will point out to me a way to provide for them."

"And I am thinking also of your career," she added.

"A career," he said, "built upon the suppression of honest thought, and made successful by fawning upon the rich while the poor are crying out for social, spiritual and material bread, would be a most inglorious and unhallowed thing."

Then she spoke more bluntly.

"You are too visionary," she said. "You are too spiritual, too religious and high-minded to cope with the crowd that is hunting you. They have planned your destruction, and they are going to accomplish it. There isn't any God anywhere who can save you. You've got to save yourself or you'll perish. I know it. I had to tell you this. I wouldn't be human if I kept it to myself."

He did not reprove her or try to reason with her. The argumentative stage in the struggle had long passed by. But he was equally blunt and insistent in his answer.

"Mrs. Bradley," he said, "if I were sure that my crusade would bring me to the debtor's prison or the hangman's rope, I would not abate one jot or tittle from my effort. My reason and my conscience have convinced me that I am right; and my duty to God