Sunday morning dawned on the city with the promise of a perfect day. Never had John King's church seemed more crowded at a forenoon service. The news of the famous tenor voice which had been heard now for several weeks had reached people in the suburbs and the church was filled with strangers. The galleries overflowed. There was an eager air among the new comers.

John King came into the pulpit looking worn and sad. His night had been a night of vigil and the hours had been full of groaning anguish for sinful souls and especially for the one young soul who in a few minutes would be singing so wonderfully. That was a professional mystery to John King, that one who did not feel the glory of the redeemed could move the hearts of others by his rendering of words in music that were not true to his own inner life.

It was natural that the preacher's sermon this morning should be from the text "For the Son of Man came to seek and to save that which was lost." John King's customary fiery eloquence was subdued. He spoke slower, with even more feeling than usual. But when he finished and sat with bowed head during the singing of the solo, very few persons in the church guessed that his heart was groaning for the singer that he might be saved.

How strange it all seemed to John King that morning! What wonderful power the boy's voice had! Whether Victor knew what the subject of the sermon would be he could not tell. But there he stood singing,

"There were ninety and nine--"

Never had he sung with more pathos, more feeling. People who had sat cold and unmoved during the sermon felt the tears start and the heart thrill at the simple words of the song. The preacher writher inwardly as he listened. The contest was sharp in him as to his duty. He prayed for help and when the service was over he went back into the music room.

Victor was there drawing on his gloves just getting ready to go out.

"Won't you wait a few moments, Stanwood? I want to see you."

Victor sat down wondering if John King was going to tell him how much he had enjoyed his singing.

"You must not think, my dear fellow," began John King with a hearty loving manner, "that I am interfering with what is not my business, in speaking to you plainly about what has come to my knowledge. I am nearly twice as old as you are and have seen a good deal of the world, both its good and evil. I trust you will be as frank with me as I am with you for the sake of your sister, and--your profession." The preacher added the last word slowly. Victor sat with his eyes on the carpet. He did not reply nor look up. John King took it for a bad sign, but went on.

"Is it true, my dear Stanwood, that you have recently been in the habit of frequenting the gambling places on Clark street, or was last Saturday your first visit to them?"

Victor turned deadly pale. His hands trembled. His lips quivered. Then a flush of anger came over his face. He lifted his eyes, looked King defiantly in the face and said,

"What business is that of yours?"

"Only the business of one who cannot endure to see such a life as yours lost in those hells. Think of your sister. Think of what you have at stake in using such a power as you possess to move humanity. You cannot afford to throw all this away in such a horrible manner. The gambling passion is death to all true life."

King rose and went over and put his hand on Victor's shoulder.

"My boy, you have only had a taste of it yet. Choose to give it up now. Your career will be ruined, your sister's heart will be broken, there will be nothing for you in the future but sorrow and disgrace and shame if you let the gambling passion become your master."

"I can manage my own affairs. You needn't preach to me. To hear you talk one would think I was a drunken fool incapable of governing myself."

John King was silent now. His calm look gave way for an instant to one of indignation. That passed at once and nothing but sorrowful compassion looked out of his great dark eyes. He would not give up this soul yet.

Victor had started towards the door.

"Stanwood," the word came clear and steady while John King stood still without a motion to detain him. "Are you going to sing for us any more?"

"You would not care to have a professional gambler sing in your church," said Victor with a sneer.

"If you will sing for us, I will use my influence with the music committee to have your pay increased. I understand they have not made terms with you yet after this morning."

Victor looked at John King with some surprise. Then he bit his lips and replied,

"I have made arrangements to sing hereafter at the Cathedral on St. Mark's Avenue. I don't care to sing any more where I am watched by spies."

There was a pause. Then John King said simply, "The time may come, Stanwood, when you will need a friend. When that time comes, if you will remember this occasion and my reasons for talking to you as I have this morning, and come to me for any help I can give you, it will be given as freely as the love I have for you this very moment. In Christ's name, dear soul, I pray you may be saved."

There was a second of indecision in Victor's manner as John King spoke, which revealed the inward conflict. Then without a word he turned and went away, leaving the preacher with bowed head and heavy heart praying for him. It would be unaccountable to explain Victor's behaviour on this occasion without knowing the inner history of his experience since the night of the memorable concert. The great moving motive that urged him on was his all-absorbing vanity. That vanity, however, was the real means of bringing him into the reach of the gambling passion. His great extravagances were clothes and jewelry. The very first money that came into his hands from his Sunday singing he spent in the purchase of an opal ring that cost twenty-five dollars. He went to a fashionable tailor three weeks after that and bought a suit for $100 including overcoat and gloves and neckties and other luxuries of the toilet case. When Victoria had been with him she had regulated his expenditures. Now that she was gone he put no check upon his extravagances. It was easy at the rate he was going, to expend every cent he earned and all that Victoria sent him. To avoid suspicion on his father's part he had at first turned over a little money for household uses. But during the last month he had gone into debt for several things. And that had led up to the Clark street experience.

One evening he had gone to a band concert and while there he met a young man who had formerly played in the same orchestra with Victor's father. He had chatted with Victor during the intervals between the numbers and at the close of the concert had walked along towards home with him. Cutting through Clark Street to shorten the distance, his companion had proposed that they stop at a friend's for a moment and Victor, unsuspecting the exact character of the place, went in. Once there he yielded to the horrible fascination of the gambling mania. He went repeatedly after the first evening. When Tom saw him that Saturday he had become familiar with the place and others like it by frequent visits. It is needless to say that he was the victim of the professional sharpers who fleeced their victims so cunningly that them were actually made to believe that they would some time win everything back. It seemed incredible that the artistic gifted soul of one like Victor could fall down at the feet of this Gambling God. Nevertheless he fell and with a swiftness that was terrible. It was his miserable vanity, his love of display, his yearning for fine, luxurious things that led him to his fall. And neither the pleadings of his own conscience nor the remembrance of Victoria nor the manly appeal of John King were of any avail to turn him back from his chosen way. His deception in his letters to Victoria in which he asked for money was simply one indication among others of the awful nature of the passion which, as John King had said, is death to all true life and bound to become master unless fought and subdued.

So Victor began the next Sunday to sing in the Cathedral at St. Mark's Avenue, where his voice attracted even more people, if possible, than at John King's church.

Meanwhile Victoria was as yet ignorant of the truth and her happiness was undimmed by the knowledge of what would have poisoned her career. There was no one to inform her of Victor's habits. The father guessed or suspected what was going on but his own lapses into drunken ways deadened his sense of honor at moral weakness in his bou. John King was honestly puzzled for the time being to know just the extent of his duty in the way of informing Victoria of what he knew. He was not in doubt for long but while he hesitated, Victoria went on her way with the old thought of the brother. She was living a life of genuine enjoyment in spite of the severe physical strain under which she was compelled to perform her part in the company.

One who has never gone upon the road with a musical or theatrical company cannot understand the constant tension which such a life implies. It is made up of stops at all kinds of hotels, irregular hours for sleep, unnatural hours for travel and eating, with demands upon the patience and the nerves that belong to such a career. Victoria endured the hardship and excitement as part of the life she had chosen for herself. She was a favorite with the other members of the company because she was free from all professional pride and jealousy. Several times she had accommodated other members in the hotel advantages and other ways where musical and theatrical professional people do not usually take pains to be friendly. As a consequence nearly every one in the company was on good terms with the little violinist. The public received her warmly also. Hardly a concert passed in any town without making two or three recalls for Victoria. Her reputation was steadily growing. After she had been with the manager four months he even hinted at an increase in the contract price but had not yet paid her more than at the beginning.

So the life, the public life, pleased Victoria, and as she said to herself it suited her. It was a busy life with very little leisure for social pleasures or reading or culture aside from the individual culture of one's own gift. Sundays were rest days. The circuit of regular engagement sometimes called for Sunday travel. It happened that during this special season, Sundays were little broken into and generally Victoria spent the day either in writing to Victor, resting quietly at her hotel, or attending services somewhere with one of two of the company. When the Sunday found them in one of the larger towns or in the cities, she found out the superintendent of the hospital or blind asylum or whatever institution for suffering humanity was established near, and offered her services as player for the pleasure of the inmates. Her habit in this which the other members of the company thought an odd whim, became known as her reputation grew, and very often she would find waiting for her in places where Sunday stops were made, three or four invitation to as many different hospitals or refuges of suffering human kind begging her to come and give one of her Sunday recitals. They were not recitals either. They were rather the tenderest, most healing, devout, reverent hymns of prayer that she made her beloved Cremona breathe out like a living soul for the delight and rest and worship of the poor soul racked with pain or tortured with sin. The sight of Victoria on a Sunday afternoon, standing in the middle of one of the wards of a great hospital with rows of white beds stretching past on both sides, with nurses and doctors and servants standing about listening, with white faces on many pillows glistening with tears as the music pulsated and throbbed and flowed through heart and mind with uplifting and soothing power,-- this was what very few who saw and heard ever forgot. As for Victoria it was her one hour of worship in public. Many a grand church had eagerly sought to add to its attractions for Sunday music the little woman who played such a violin, but if there was a hospital or poor house or a refuge for sinful or depraved that needed her or asked her she always went where the suffering and the sinful were. She never played on such occasions without thinking of Aura. The white loving unconscious face of her dead friend just as she looked that time when she smiled and said, "I knew you would keep your promise," looked up at Victoria from many and many a cot in strange places where she played those Sunday afternoons. Then she would go back to her room and often kneel down and pray that she might atone for her former selfishness, as she called it, by future service. There was something of the Roman Catholic in Victoria and yet she was not what people would generally call a religious girl. She was religious to the extent that she would have done almost any amount of penance for a wrong but it is doubtful if she ever would have confessed her wrong to anyone except to God alone.

The Question Class had nearly all gathered at John King's the evening after Victor's last solo in the church. It lacked a few minutes of eight o'clock. The class was having a social time as usual. Tom and Richard were discussing a recent novel; three or four young men and women were standing near by and listening.

"Of course," Tom was saying, "It isn't necessary that every novel should be a sermon. That isn't the object of a novel."

"At the same time," said Richard, "a novel without a definite purpose to teach or better the reader always seems to me like a waste of brain to write and a waste of time to read."

"Mr. Bruce would rule out all the books that are written to amuse people," Miss Fergus remarked with a laugh.

"Not if the amusement was what people needed to rest them and make them better able to do their work. There is a place in the world for what is funny as well as for what is serious."

"Yes," said Tom, " ‘a time to laugh and a time to weep.' That's scripture."

Just then John King came in and the class settled itself for the evening. He had not had as much time as usual to look over the questions and he said so to the class, asking them to be patient with him if his answers were partial and unsatisfactory.

The first question was, "what would you do with a million dollars if you had them?"

"I don't know. Do you? Does anybody? I would buy a cork foot for a poor woman who lost her foot by an accident lately and can't earn her living by washing as she did before the loss of her foot. Sixty dollars will buy it and she can go on with her work, so the surgeon says, but no one has sixty dollars to spare. At least I have not been able to find any one who has that much, though I have been to several men who are worth several hundred thousand dollars. Of course if I had two million dollars I could probably spare sixty dollars out of it. And then I would buy Grace there a piano if I thought she would make a good use of it and with a part of what was left I would start about a hundred Kindergartens down in the slums and endow them handsomely. And--well I don't know. It would puzzle me to know how to get rid of such a quantity as a million. It would be an awful responsibility. I believe I should want a guardian appointed over me and even than I expect I should make a good may foolish uses of such an amount of money. I expect I should have to resign from my church if I fell heir to a million dollars."

"Why?" asked Tom suddenly. The class laughed at the interruption, it was so sudden and so unusual.

"Why!" replied John King with a comical look at Tom. "Because if I was worth a million, my church wouldn't think it necessary to pay me my salary promptly." The preacher took up another question.

"What is the best use to which a large fortune can be put?"

"The questions seem to me to run to finance to-night. It does not seem hard to tell how we would dispose of other people's money if we only had it, but if we actually had it to use, it would not seem so easy. I once knew a millionaire who said he was in almost constant trouble concerning the disposition of his benevolences. He said people had no idea of the number of calls that a rich man had upon his benevolence. Undoubtedly the best use to which a large fortune can be put is to make it do the most good in its use to the largest number of people and do it in one's own life time. I an one of those who believe the right and best use of money is to make it do all it will while I am alive to plan and execute. I don't believe in bequeathing very large sums to people or institutions after I am dead. In nine cases out of ten where a rich man leaves his son large wealth that the son has never worked for or denied himself to get, it has been squandered or foolishly invested, leaving the nest generation where the grandfather began his struggle. I would bequeath plenty of knowledge, virtue, manhood, energy, cheerfulness, but not much unearned wealth. This inheritance of other people's money as a general thing produces a class of selfish aristocrats who have a scorn of physical toil and are lacking in sympathy with the great toiling masses. The best use to which a large fortune can be put is to use it. And to use a large fortune right requires more wisdom and consecration than most men of wealth possess. It is very easy to ask What would Christ do with a large fortune if he were living now? It is not so easy to tell how he would act in detail.

"What! Another one on the money question?" John King exclaimed as he took the third question out of the box. "Well, this seems like a fair one."

"Is not the possession of money really necessary to the happiness and the very development of life as we have to live it on earth?"

"Yes, we have to pay our bills if we wish to escape a good deal of worry. Unless we are of that class of people who never worry about anything, not even their own sins. There is nothing gained by crying down money. The Bible does not say that money is evil. It is the love of it that is the root of all kinds of evil. But money itself is a very convenient medium of exchange and every civilized man must have it to buy food, clothes, education, and a thousand other necessities. In that sense it is absolutely necessary. It is true that certain things are out of our reach if we do not possess wealth. We cannot travel abroad, we cannot educate ourselves in Art or Music or Literature or Science to any great extent without money. We are shut out from very many grand and beautiful experiences no doubt, if we do not possess the only thing that will make them known to us, and in that sense it is literally true that the possession of wealth is necessary to our development. That is what comes of being civilized. But while all this is true, don't make the mistake of supposing that happiness depends on money. If it did, the world would be a much more sorrowful place than it now is. Happiness is not the result of possessions. It may exist with and may exist without them. The development of civilized life as we live it, may make large use of money. That is, money can buy development, it can buy leisure, travel, luxuries. But it cannot buy contentment, peace of conscience, or happiness. Don't forget the saying of the greatest and wisest teacher of human life. 'For a man's life consisteth not in the abundance of the things which he possesseth.' It is not what we have that determines our happiness or unhappiness. It is what we are."

"(1.) What are the most conspicuous faults of the young men of this age?

"(2.) What are the most conspicuous faults of the young women of this age?"

"This is contrary to our rules. Only one question from each member of the class, you know. But we will let it pass this time. Perhaps no one has a right to say what are the faults of an age. We see so few people out of the millions living. The faults of the young men I know, say a few hundred in all (young men, not faults), are thoughtlessness, shallow thinking, lack of reverence, not enough definite purpose in life, too easy contentment with easy going things. A good many young men are vain of their physical beauty and--well it hurts me to try to answer this question. I don't like to hurt your feelings either--"

"Isn't present company excepted, sir?" asked Tom.

"You must not force me to be too honest, Tom, we are all mortal. As to the young women, their greatest faults are--I declare--I don't think of any just at present," (loud cries of protest from several young men in the class), "but on second thought I may be allowed to say that there are faults enough, that is to say, well--we are all human. Really this is not in my line, seems too much like finding fault, young people, and that won't do, especially in a preacher. So we had best let this question pass. One or two more."

"Is it harder to do right than wrong?' "Sometimes. Depends on what sort of a habit you've got into. Doing right is a habit. Doing wrong is a habit. It's like going to church. If you are in the habit of going it's easy. If not, it's hard. I have known people to stay away from prayer meeting on a rainy night just because they were not in the habit of going on a pleasant night. If Adam and Eve had resisted the first temptation and the second and the third, after awhile they would have acquired the habit of doing right all the time."

"Is it pleasanter to do right than wrong?"

"Ah! I suspect some of you have been writing your questions in company. I don't care. It shows an interest in the work that does me good."

"Pleasanter to do right than wrong? Try it and see. Most of you have done so, I take it. What result did you find? Answer your own question. People sometimes sneer at goodness as if it were dull and stupid and never had any good times. The time to judge of the pleasantness of doing right or wrong is not at the immediate time of the action, it is in the end. At the close of the transaction. That my come years after. Some things that taste good at the time leave a bitter taste in the mouth afterwards. There is only one right answer to this question. It is always pleasanter to do right than wrong. We are not to judge by the feeling, but by the result."

John King dismissed the class early on account of pressure of other work. He was also feeling more than usually grave and troubled over Victor and his knowledge of the boy's serious danger. As the week wore on he at last decided on his course of action. He could not let the matter remain where it was. There was a bright strong soul going to ruin. It was not in the nature of John King to see it and do nothing. And so he did what seemed to him the only thing left for him to do.

When Saturday came again Victoria was playing in one of the large towns three hundred miles from John King's church and the Cathedral of St. Mark's Avenue. In the afternoon of the day she had received a short letter from Victor.

Dear Vi:

Father is ill again. He took a severe cold three days ago. His old rheumatism is confining him to the house. He will not be able to walk for a week at the quickest. I find that the expenses of the house are very large. Father demands the best of everything when he is ill. Don't you think it would be possible to get the manager to raise your salary? Insist upon it, Vi. You are worth more than $75 a week. If you can spare a little first of next week it will be a great help. I am singing at St. Marks's Avenue now. I don't get but three dollars a Sunday more that John King's paid, but every little helps. Don't get sick.

Good by,

Victor.

Victoria read this letter with a feeling of pain. It seemed cold and hard. It lacked loving phrases. Not even a "Yours Lovingly" at the close. And the constant appeal for money hurt her. She would have shared every cent she had with Victor but could not explain his extravagance. It seemed so unnecessary. A vague feeling of trouble, of coming sorrow passed over her. She went to the hall for the evening concert, feeling depressed. Once on the stage with her instrument she played as usual. But she was glad when it was over. The hotel was near by but it was raining and as she came out of the hall carrying her violin she felt so tired and full of longing to get into her room that without waiting for others as usual, she beckoned for a cab. There were half a dozen near and two or three started up towards the curb. At that moment a man who had been standing near the corner watching people come out of the hall came out and standing in front of Victoria, took off his hat. She was surprised but not frightened, until as the electric light blazed out clearer she saw it was her father just drunk enough to be very timidly polite. The shock of meeting him at this distance from home just after Victor's letter, so startled Victoria that she stepped back off the curb and lost her balance. One of the cabs coming up, knocked the violin case out of her hand. It fell under the horse's feet and before Victoria had recovered herself to rescue it, the horses plunged violently and pulled the heavy cab over it. The light wood case was smashed into splinters. Victoria, regardless of all danger, sprang down into the confusion, even the strange appearance of her father forgotten in the thought of the accident to the precious Cremona, loaned her by the manager. Some one coming out of the hall helped her. She dragged the fragments of the precious case out upon the sidewalk and knelt over them in the rain. The violin had been completely ruined. The neck was broken into several pieces and the body of the instrument was a mess of brown splinters. She buried her face in her hands and sobbed. It was like the death of an old friend to see her dear old violin torn to pieces. She shuddered. Then she lifted her eyes and saw her father standing there.

~ end of chapter 4 ~