The One Woman | Page 2

very unusual to his fiery
temperament.
A half-dozen reporters yawned and drummed on their fingers with their
pencils. The rumour of a brewing church trouble had been published,
but he had not referred to it in the morning, and evidently was not
going to do so to-night.
Toward the close of his sermon he recovered from the stupor with
which he had been struggling and ended with something of his usual
fervour.
He was a man of powerful physique, wide chest and broad shoulders, a
tall athlete, six feet four, of Viking mould, hair blond and waving,
steel-gray eyes, a strong aquiline nose and frank, serious face.
He had been called from a town in southern Indiana to the Pilgrim
Congregational Church in New York when, on its last legs, it was about
to sell out and move uptown. He had created a sensation, and in six
months the building could not hold the crowds which struggled to hear
him.
His voice was one of great range and its direct personal tone put him in
touch with every hearer. Before they knew it his accents quivered with
emotion that swept the heart. Emotional thinking was his trait. He

could thrill his crowd with a sudden burst of eloquence, but he loved to
use the deep vibrant subtones of his voice so charged with feeling that
he melted the people into tears. His face, flashing and trembling,
smiling and clouding with hidden fires of passion, held every eye
riveted. His gestures were few and seemed the resistless burst of
enormous reserve power--an impression made stronger by his great
hairy blue-veined hands and the way he stood on his big, broad feet. He
spoke in impassioned moments with the rush of lightning, and yet each
word fell clean-cut and penetrating.
An idealist and dreamer, in love with life, colour, form, music and
beauty, he had the dash and brilliancy, the warmth and enthusiasm of a
born leader of men. The impulsive champion of the people, the friend
of the weak, he had become the patriot prophet of a larger democracy.
A passion for music, and a fad for precious stones, especially pearls
and opals, which he carried in his pockets and handled with the
tenderness of a lover, were his hobbies. He had in a marked degree the
peculiar power of attracting children and animals, and all women liked
him instinctively from the first.
But to-night he was not himself. After a brief prayer at the close of the
sermon he dismissed the crowd with the announcement of an
after-meeting for those personally interested in religion.
As the people poured out through the open doors the unceasing roar of
the great city's life swept in drowning the soft strains of the organ--the
jar and whir of wheels, the wheeze of brakes, the tremor of machinery,
the rumble of cab, the clatter of hoof-beat, the cry of child and hackman,
the haunting murmur of millions like the moan of the sea borne on
breezes winged with the odours of saloon and kitchen, stable and
sewer--the crash of a storm of brute forces on the senses, tearing the
nerves, crushing the spirit, bruising the soul, and strangling the memory
of a sane life.
Gordon frowned and shivered as he sat waiting for the crowd to go, and
a look of depression swept his face.

These after-meetings for personal appeal were a regular feature of his
ministry. He held them every Sunday evening, no matter how tired he
was or how hopeless the effort might seem. When the doors were
closed about a hundred people had gathered in the centre of the church
near the front.
He rose from his chair behind the altar-rail with an evident effort to
throw off his weariness. He had laid aside his pulpit robe, a tribute to
ritualism that this church had dragooned him into accepting.
"My friends," he began slowly and softly, with his hands folded behind
him, "first a few words of testimony from any who can witness to the
miracle of the Spirit in our daily life. We are crushed sometimes with
the brutal weight of matter, and yet over all the Spirit broods and gives
light and life. Who can bear witness to this miracle?"
"I can!" cried a man, who rose trembling with deep feeling.
His high, well-moulded forehead showed the heritage of intellectual
power. His eyes, soft and tender as a woman's, had in their depths the
record of a great sorrow.
Taking his watch out of his pocket, he looked at it a moment, and, as
the tears began to steal down his face, spoke in a tremulous voice.
"Seven years, four months, three days and six hours ago the Spirit of
God came to my poor lost soul and found it in a