On the hot agony in his heart the languorous Southern spring laid a cooling and delicate touch.

Beneath the throb of his pain he felt the stirring of formless, indefinite longings, half spiritual, half physical, which seemed older and more universal than his immediate suffering.
For six weeks the canker gnawed at his heart, and he gave no sign of its presence.

Then relief came to him for a few hours one day when he drifted into a local meeting in Applegate and entered into a discussion of politics.

At the end he spoke for twenty minutes, and when his speech was over, he told himself that at last he had found something that might take the place of love in his life.

The game of politics showed itself to him in all the exciting allurement of a passion.
A gentle mannered old clergyman, with a dream-haunted face and the patient waiting attitude of one who had watched for miracles for fifty years, spoke to him when the meeting was breaking up, and after a brief conversation, invited him to address a club of workingmen on the following Friday.