CHAPTER XXII

AN EPISCOPAL BENEDICTION

The tragedy was now complete. Its climax had been reached when two souls were thrust, unshriven, into the Great Presence. The city gasped and shuddered, and rioted in the rehearsal of strange and conflicting stories. But at the heart of every one of them, tangled in its sordid meshes, was the name of the rector of Christ Church. The motive for the murder of Mary Bradley was known of all men. If Lamar, dead by his own hand, had lived to shout it from the housetops, it could not have been better or more widely understood. Yet no one now charged the minister with conscious guilt. His life had been too open and too clean to make that believable. It was said of him now only that he had been the victim of his own deplorable theories and his mistaken zeal. But it was plain to every one that the end had been reached. His old parishioners, friend and foe alike, admitted and declared that his further ministrations at Christ Church had become impossible. He, himself, in an hour of forced calmness and deliberate thought, had reached the same inevitable conclusion. "Ye shall know them by their fruits." The fruits of his ministry, so far as he could now see, had been scandal, riot, bloodshed, murder, suicide, a wrecked and desolated church; an unhallowed harvest. And the future held no hope of better things.

For three days he wrestled with himself in agony. On the morning of the fourth day he boarded a train, bound for the see city, to meet a telegraphed appointment with his bishop. Twenty miles out Barry Malle-