“Fifteen.”

“And you’ve come to be invaluable to me. You’ve stayed by the job and you’ve been faithful to the Gazette and its policy. I hate to see you going off on this tangent. You’re deluded.”

“I have been all these years, Mr. Carter. But not now. For the first time in my life, I see clearly.”

Carter moved over to his desk and sat down. Then he said coldly, “You refuse to do what I ask, then?”

“Yes. I can’t do it.”

A pause. Then, “One of us will have to go, Barnes. We are not running a Sunday school here.”

“I expect I had better go anyway, Mr. Carter. There are too many things in the paper that I can no longer agree with, and they will be making trouble between us all the time.”

“You can stay through your month,” Carter said shortly. “At the end of that time, I can prove to you that you are a fool and you will want to stay with the Gazette.”

Barnes looked at the editor earnestly. The new Barnes. What a wonder that Carter did not see, right there in front of him, a miracle greater than a dead person raised to life! But his eyes were blinded so that he could not see.

Barnes went out gently, and Carter sat moodily staring at the things on his desk, but not seeing them. Suddenly, he seized the manuscript Barnes had brought back, opened it, and for the fourth time began to read it. It was the most astonishing manuscript he had ever read.

In the first place, the beauty of the content of the manuscript was beyond anything Jasper Carter had ever known. In all his experience as an editor, as a writer of brilliant editorials and pungent paragraphs, he had never read anything equal to it. Neither could he recall any standard author of any country who had ever written anything to equal it.

Added to its beauty of expression was also an astounding knowledge of history and mankind. It was so profound, it was overwhelming. Nothing like it in all ancient or modern literature had ever come under his observation.

At the close of the manuscript were some verses, so exquisite, so marvelously constructed, that he held his breath as he read them over. Something in them stirred even his dull imagination, as if into that prosaic newspaper office had come the fragrant beat of an angel’s wing. The indescribable harmony, pathos, and charm of the lines defied analysis and criticism. Something in them gripped his heart. He had always denied the supernatural and spiritual. But what was this within him that, in spite of himself, acknowledged something subtly different from mere human intellect and knowledge?

He rose, greatly excited, and seized the paper, lifting it up with his powerful hands as if to tear it in pieces. He knew he would not dare to print this marvelous manuscript in his newspaper. The entire thing was a direct and overwhelming blow at his entire editorial policy. It was so perfect, so clearly a scathing rebuke of all the methods he had pursued all his life, that every reader of the Gazette would see in its every line the selfish, hypocritical, self-centered, unscrupulous editor of the paper. It would make him the butt and scoffing of every newspaper in the country, even of those journals that were like his own. And he knew it.