"Ah, well, you're young, and I'm sure your twenty-five dollars for Helen's poor people will cover a multitude of sins.

I fancy you are not quite so bad as you would have us believe." Lois watched him draw his check, and was divided between admiration and an undefined dissatisfaction with herself for feeling admiration for what really meant so little.
"Thank you very much," the rector said heartily.
"Oh, you're welcome, I'm sure," answered the other.
Dr.Howe folded the check away in a battered leather pocket-book, shiny on the sides and ragged about the corners, and overflowing with odds and ends of memoranda and newspaper clippings; a row of fish-hooks was fastened into the flap, and he stopped to adjust these before he went into the house to answer Helen's letter.
He snubbed her good-naturedly, telling her not to worry about things too great for her, but beneath his consciousness there lurked a little discomfort, or even irritation.

Duties which seem dead and buried, and forgotten, are avenged by the sting of memory.

In the rector's days at the theological school, he had himself known those doubts which may lead to despair, or to a wider and unflinching gaze into the mysteries of light.

But Archibald Howe reached neither one condition nor the other.
He questioned many things; he even knew the heartache which the very fear of losing faith gives.