Then he found himself back in the crowd in front of the Association Building, staring again as he had so many times now during the last three months, fascinated, and fighting an impulse to surrender, to call out before the multitudes that thronged him and cry to him, “My Lord and my God! I will follow thee even unto death!”

But it would mean such surrender. It would change the current of his whole purpose in life. It would make him the wonder of all Raymond. And his soul fiercely rebelled at the call of that quiet but commanding voice whose tones he could not silence.

He went to bed but lay wide awake, thinking. At last he rose and dressed, and after a moment of indecision went down into the hotel lobby and sat around, staring at the late arrivals and theater parties. Then, still urged by a restlessness that grew, he went out on the street.

It was about half past one. He strolled aimlessly up Pennsylvania Avenue until he came to the monument at the end of the Avenue. He sat on one of the steps for some time, then rose and went around the Capitol Hill and approached the building from the front.

Before he knew what he was doing, he found himself going up the steps that led to the terrace at the back. He had strolled up the Avenue and the hill very slowly. When he came out on the terrace, it was half past two o’clock. He walked forward to the top of the wall and looked out over the city.

He had been standing there a few moments when he heard a voice at the end of the terrace walk. He stood up straight, every fiber in him quivering, every sense of mind and body awake.

That voice! How familiar it sounded to him. He had heard it sighing over the woes of childhood and the tears of womanhood, had heard it ringing in triumph over the progress of the Kingdom on earth, and he had heard it thundering in condemnation of brute human selfishness. But he had never yet heard it as it was now!

For he realized in a moment that Jesus was over at the end of the terrace praying. In the unfathomable earnestness and depth of his cry for the city and the people and the sinful world, his desire had finally become audible, and Carter of all men was alone there in the early morning hour to hear it!

Carter himself never could describe the impulse that moved him. But he had an intense desire to hear. It did not seem wrong to steal slowly, imperceptibly, nearer the unseen figure over there in the darkness, the figure that was pleading for—what?