recounting his labors for purity, and assaulting the booze interests which had bribed this poor, weak, silly girl to attack Elmer.
Before eight on Sunday morning, telegrams had come in from the Yorkville Methodist Church and the Napap, congratulating Elmer, asserting that they had never doubted his innocence, and offering him the pastorate of Yorkville and the executive secretaryship of the Napap.
When the papers had first made charges against Elmer, Cleo had said furiously, "Oh, what a wicked, wicked lie—darling, you know I'll stand back of you!" but his mother had crackled, "Just how much of this is true, Elmy? I'm getting kind of sick and tired of your carryings on!"
Now, when he met them at Sunday breakfast, he held out the telegrams, and the two women elbowed each other to read them.
"Oh, my dear, I am so glad and proud!" cried Cleo; and Elmer's mother—she was an old woman, and bent; very wretched she looked as she mumbled, "Oh, forgive me, my boy! I've been as wicked as that Dowler woman!"
But for all that, would his congregation believe him?
If they jeered when he faced them, he would be ruined, he would still lose the Yorkville pastorate and the Napap. Thus he fretted in the quarter-hour before morning service, pacing his study and noting through the window—for once, without satisfaction—that hundreds on hundreds were trying to get into the crammed auditorium.
His study was so quiet. How he missed Hettie's presence!
He knelt. He did not so much pray as yearn inarticulately. But this came out clearly: "I've learned my lesson. I'll never look at a girl again. I'm going to be the head of all the moral agencies in the country—nothing can stop me, now I've got the Napap!—but I'm going to be all the things I want other folks to be! Never again!"
He stood at his study door, watching the robed choir filing
