“I don’t know anything about him,” Carter said shortly. He rose to go.

The congressman followed him to the door. “Where did he come from? I mean, where does he stay?”

“How do I know?”

“I thought you said you knew him.”

“I have seen him many times. He was in the gallery today.”

“The gallery?”

“Right behind the members’ gallery where you were sitting.”

“And no one knew him or recognized him?”

“It seems not.”

“Why didn’t you—you said he passed you—why didn’t you ask him where he was staying?”

Carter was silent, and the congressman noted his look. It was unpleasant to see a look that revealed passions Carter vainly tried to conceal. “Find it for yourself!” he said after a while. “He makes it a practice to stay with some preacher. Of course you’re on intimate terms with some minister of the gospel!”

“Oh, of course,” replied the congressman, “same as you. All the same,” he muttered.

Carter, with a curt, “Good day,” went out.

“All the same, I would give a good deal to see that person again and have a talk with him. And to think I actually talked with Jesus and didn’t know it! And it is the twentieth century!”

He went back to his desk, but was too excited to attend to any business, and after a few minutes of inactivity he went out.

Finding some members in the corridor, he told them of his meeting. At once he found the news was of absorbing interest. To his great surprise, no one denied the identity of his “casual stranger,” and with the greatest eagerness a gathering group thickened about him, asking questions and wondering at the probable outcome of Jesus’s visit to the national capital.

Carter went back to his hotel and brooded. That chance meeting with Jesus had shaken him to his depth. All the time he was with the congressman, he could hear ringing in his heart those two words of Jesus as he passed him.

Follow me!

He knew they had been spoken. It was not an illusion, as he vainly tried to cheat himself into believing.

Follow me!

Two words had changed world history. And Carter sat there as the night darkened over Washington, fighting the battle of the ages for his old selfish life, fighting against the rule of Jesus which he knew well would overturn the narrow, ugly, self-centered habits of fifty years, and revolutionize his paper and make him a marked man in Raymond.

“I will not have this man to rule over me,” he repeated time and again. “I will not call him Master.” He had defied him when he passed that afternoon. He would defy him and his mastership always.

Always?