Adoni was seated in his study. Upon his desk were heaped the usual pile of mail; letters of all description asking for his assistance, financially, spiritually and physically.

Suddenly his face lighted with pleasure as he detected the familiar addressed envelope of his sister Martha, who lived with his widowed mother in the foot-hills of the Adirondacks, where Adoni was born. With eager haste he opened the letter and read:

"You dear old brother: This is to thank you for the lovely long letter and the books; they both proved such delightful reading. You are always doing the right thing at the right time. I hope you will live up to this reputation by coming home this vacation; it's heavenly up here on the mountainside. A few resorters have already arrived in the village. Both Frances and you will find, enough diversion to satisfy every reasonable requirement. If you cannot come for the whole summer, come for a time at least. Mother is not so well, though she does not admit it. But, Oh! Don, I cannot blind myself to her increasing weakness. With each day she seems to grow frailer, more spiritual. She loves to go into the silence; upon three occasions I have discovered her in a trance-like state. When awakened, she quieted my fears by the calm assurance that she had merely been on a journey. Once to the great Adept, and twice she avers that she visited you. She seems to be greatly troubled about you, Don, and feels that you are facing a great trial. She has written a letter, which I am to give you in case she passes over suddenly. Oh! Brother, I know I must bear it and I try to be brave and cheerful but my heart is heavy. Come if you can; it will make us both so happy. Mother is counting the days until your vacation begins and is just holding on by sheer will until you come. With loads of love and kisses from both of us. Your unhappy sister, Martha."

As Adoni finished the letter a great anxiety crept into his heart. He was more alarmed by the appealing message of his sister than he cared to admit. He consulted his watch. It was ten o'clock; the train left at five which would bring him to the village about midnight. He resolved to go. Hastily he proceeded to examine the other communications, when the door burst imperiously open and Father Gebhard burst wrathfully into the room.

"Father Gebhard!" cried Adoni, wondering at such an intrusion.

Father Gebhard was usually the most considerate of conventional requirements of any man he knew, but now he had entered boldly, without so much as a tap.

"Don't Father me," thundered the priest in tones of denunciation, his face red and hot from the unwonted tumult within. "A man who has deliberately thrust a poor girl into a state of miserable degradation through his damnable, blasphemous, cowardly-----"

"Hold, Father, hold," commanded Adorn, now master of himself entirely. " 'Let him that thinketh he standeth, take heed lest he fall.' On what grounds do you base your fearful accusation?"

"On the grounds of your damnable heresy," blazed the priest. "A Christian minister opposing a lawful marriage, between that dastardly brother-in-law of yours and his poor victim who happens to be one of my flock."

"I am strongly opposed to marriages of that kind."

"Yes, I have heard of your freak theories but am more astonished that you will defy God's most holy marriage law and the law of the immaculate mother church."

"What is God's most holy marriage law?" questioned Adoni in low, even tones, bending on the priest a piercing look of challenge.

"The sanction of the holy mother church."

"Can the sanction of the church protect a woman from subjection to a man's sensual desire, when he cares nothing for the spiritual love that should govern all true marriages?"

"But why should you openly try to prevent justice in a case of this kind?"

"Nor do I; it is in the interest of justice and morality that I contend against the union."

"Then permit me to say that your ideas of justice and morality do not coincide with mine. And I am here to see that justice is done. The girl is as good as he is; why shouldn't he be made to marry her?"

"Lillian is entirely too good for my brother-in-law, who I am sorry to say, is as unfit to be the husband of any woman, as he is to have the care and training of a child."

"The church will look after the child's moral training."

"Doubtless, as it looked after its mother's training."

"The church is not responsible for the willful perversity of her children."

"I deny that it was perversity as much as ignorance on Lillian's part. However, the point I wish to make clear is that the child and its mother will be better off without the marriage."

"That is simply a pretext. I understand your objection, of course, but the child must be provided for and Lillian must have the protection of its father's name."

"His name will not protect her from his scorn and neglect; from his lustful passion or from the danger from infection and the demoralizing effect of continual association with a libertine. To me the dangers to which Lillian would be exposed in marriage with Gerald, are far greater and more fatal in their consequences than those from which his name would shield her."

"But she risked those dangers before marriage and I fail to see how, having a legal claim upon the man, would increase them. If she suffers, it is the just penalty she incurred by her own sin - woman is the evil temptress."

"So you believe that old Adam and Eve story too, do you?"

Adoni raised his arm and pointed the finger of scorn at the man who thus desecrated womanhood.

"Let me tell you now, that woman came to man pure and holy - God's greatest gift and how has he received her?" Adoni's face was white like marble and his eyes glowed like two living coals of fire. "How, I say?" he demanded, throwing his body forward in a posture of intensity. "How, I ask, has he accepted the gift? he has laid his own sin upon her and like the coward that he is, has preyed upon her credulity in his interpretation of the depravity of mankind. God! How man has polluted woman. But never, until woman resurrects herself from her own degraded condition and lifts man up to a higher and holier sphere, will this world be any better than it is today, and the time will come when she will realize that woman's highest mission on earth is to redeem man from unholy desires."