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FIDELIA

be till I married her. It's good and right to be happy, father; and I'm happy as I never supposed I could be, happy—"

"Happy!" His father arose with his hand on his table; he leaned forward so that the sun, striking through the room, shone on his face. "'But and if ye suffer for righteousness sake, happy are ye! If ye be reproached for the name of Christ, happy are ye!' They are the words of Peter, the Apostle, if you forget them, my son; they are the words he wrote when the Roman world was sinking in lust and giving itself to physical pleasures, as our world does to-day. 'But and if ye suffer for righteousness sake, happy are ye!'

"I wanted you for the work of God; I wanted you for that happiness some day, and in your right time, my son. You turned from it first to go into business to make money and now you've married for physical happiness. I said everything I could to stop you from going into business; that's true. Not because business is wrong or sinful but because it is wrong for you. I feel as I do about Fidelia, not because marriage is wrong, but because I know this marriage is dangerous to you. And you know it; that is why you concealed it from me, that was why you knew I would have stopped you, if I could.

"But now you are man and wife. God has joined you. God works in his own way; and perhaps, perhaps his way of going about the redemption of you was to double the difficulty of your redemption and break you first under the burden. Perhaps that is it."

In the evening David telephoned to Mr. Fuller, from whom he had borrowed the ten thousand dollars, and