Luke smiled his weary smile. No doubt Venable was right.
"Change that," said Luke to the stenographer—"change it to: ’I shall put on my armor and take up my broadsword to go into this battle.’"
§3. "Miss Forbes got back?" Luke asked that evening when he again rang the bell at the Forbes house.
"Yes, sir," said the servant, "she’s in the parlor. Mr. Forbes is in the library. Shall I——"
"I think I can make out with only Miss Forbes—for a while," Luke interrupted. He started to walk past the servant.
"Mr. Nicholson is there, too," the careful servant warned him. "He stayed to dinner."
"Oh, that’s good," said Luke. "Well, I’ll be glad to see him." But his tone was not so enthusiastic as it had been, and his step hesitated half-way to the parlor door.
The door was open. Through it Betty heard him, and through it she now hurried into the hall to meet him, her hands outstretched.
"How splendid of you!" she was saying. "We’ve just been reading your letter in the paper, The papers are full of you, and you don’t know how proud we are to know you, and how proud that you come here to see us at such a busy time."
Her cheeks were flushed, her brown eyes shone. Luke noted a little curl that escaped from the mass of golden hair, so like a saint’s glory to her head, and seemed to caress one coral ear.
"It’s all nothing but my good luck," he said as he took both her hands in his and thought not half so much of her words as of the woman that uttered them. "But I didn’t expect your father’s approval."
"You have it, anyway," she assured him. "Of course, he’s a Progressive, and he thinks you would have done better to come into his party; but he does admire your courage, and so does Mr. Nicholson."
"Does he?" said Luke dryly. "I hope not: it might go to my head." He remembered that Nicholson believed in celibacy for the clergy, and he was glad of it.
The young priest rose as his hostess and her new guest came into the Eighteen-Sixty parlor. He was a handsome man and his eyes were kindly, yet he had the face of an ascetic.
"Miss Forbes is right," he said. "New York needs men with high convictions and the courage of them."
"So does the Church," replied Luke heartily—"and she is getting them now."
"The Church," said Nicholson, "has always had them. What she lacked was the co-operation of such men in the practical world. If all of our millionaires were like some few of them, our work would be easy; but now we scarcely know which is more dangerous: the evil tyrant or the evil demagogue."