Burned Bridges

got up at daylight and examined the wound again he found himself afflicted with a badly swollen foot and ankle, and a steady dull ache that extended upward past the knee.

r than his body gave a measure of ease. So he adopted this position and stoically set out to endure the hurt. He lay in th

son, he put his head in the door, and whistled softly at sigh

n against the door casing and coming i

xe last night, worse luck," T

Carr in

eno

es, and Providence never seems quite able to cope with germs

easily a good deal that he had read and heard of blood-poisoning from cuts and scratches. He was secretly glad to let Carr undo th

u won't walk on that foot comfortably for two or three weeks. Just graz

got up, hopped on one foot across to the stove and began to lay a fire. He had eaten nothing since morning, and was correspondingly hungry. In addition, a certain

etail of the cabin's interior, of Thompson's painful movements,

g you can do is to come home with me and lie around till you can walk again. I've got stuff to

, however, went about it in a way that permitted nothing short of a boorish refusal, and presently Mr.

be in intimate daily contact with Sophie Carr. But his general inability to cope with emergencies-which was patent enough to a pra

n that sympathy and kindliness were fundamental attributes with Sam Carr. If he had an acid tongue his heart was tender enough. But Carr was no sentimentalist. When he h

cts men with weak heads. The more he saw of her the more he desired to see, to feast his eyes on her loveliness-and invariably, when alone, to berate himself for such a we

rprised if she could have known the amount of repression Mr. Thom

e to an argument on any subject Thompson cared to touch. He had never supposed there was a normal being with views on religion and economics, upon any manifestation of human problems, with views so contrary to his own. The maddening part of it was her ability to cite facts and authorities whose existence he was not aware of, to confute him with log

urbing. Without accepting any of the Carr dictums upon theology and theological activities, he was fast growing doubtful of his fitness for the job of herding other people into the fold. He found himself with a growing disinclination for such a task as his li

that a male celibate was an anomaly in nature's reckoning. He had thought himself immune from the ordinary passions of humanity. The strangest part of it was a saddened gladness that he was not. Somehow, he did not want to be a spiritual superman. He would rather love and struggle and suffer than stand aloof, thanking God t

was the very thing he had unwittingly been doing-that he had expected and hoped for his progress through missionary work and small churches eventually to bestow upon him a call to a wider field-a call which Sam Carr had callously suggested meant neither more nor less than a bigger church, a wider social circle, a bigger salary. And Thompson

for the emotional havoc she had wrought, and the best he could do was a despairing pang of loneliness. He wanted her. Above all he wanted her. And she was a rank infidel-a crass materialist-an intellectual C

discovered what a highly imp

vision was vouchsafed him in a simple and natural manner, although to him a