What was meant, he wanted to know, by '_the sense of pardon' ?_ Person after person at the prayer-meetings he had been frequenting had spoken of attaining it with ecstasy, or of being still shut out from it with anguish.

But how, after all, did it differ from pardoning yourself?
You had only, it seemed to him, to think very hard that you were pardoned, and the feeling came.
How could anybody tell it was more than that?
David racked his brain endlessly over the same subject.

Who could be sure that 'experience' was not all moonshine?
But he was as yet much too touched and shaken by what he had been going through to draw any trenchant conclusions.

He asked the question, however, and therein lay the great difference between him and the true stuff of Methodism.
Meanwhile, in his excitement, he, for the first time, ceased to go to the Dawsons' as usual.

To begin with, they dropped out of a mind which was preoccupied with one of the first strong emotions of adolescence.