What a picture I could have secured there if I had been capable of placing that scene on canvas! I do not know how long he spoke, and could not give his language in all its detail. I saw one newspaperman begin to take notes, then stop. His eyes gazed at the speaker, and he resumed his note taking, then stopped again. And then, as if completely under the spell of the voice, he simply listened. Like all the rest, his professional duty as a reporter was swept aside in the presence of such a tremendous tide of righteous wrath, that even I myself, innocent as I was of all the injustice he was rebuking, crouched and cowered as if I had been guilty.

I do not know how long he spoke. Somehow, as we learned during that blessed week at Raymond, time, when one is with him, goes by unnoticed.

But when he paused, a silence brooded over that crowd, so deep and painful that it was almost with a throb of relief that a cry was heard, a human cry that rose over the heads of the multitude like a lost soul’s last wail of remorse. A cry so full of anguish and repentance that, even while it broke the silence that was unbearable, it added another and different note of strangeness to the astounding scene, and men’s hearts stopped and then throbbed fast again as a man, holding his arms high up, struggled to get nearer him.

The cry that rang from his lips was spoken with deepest passion. “God be merciful to me, a sinner!” The crowd gave way for him, and he struggled up until he reached Jesus’s feet. He fell down on the steps then, and we could see Jesus stoop and raise him.

Then a man near us, who had been with us when we entered the street, spoke under his breath, “That’s Clay Ross!”

“Who?” I asked.

“Clay Ross. Of the Westgate Securities Company.”

Another man spoke. “He’s the real purchasing agent and owner of this child-labor material. What’s that? He can’t be—”

Numerous voices were raised. The deep spell of the Master’s appeal was broken. I found myself looking at Virginia as if I had been somewhere else and had suddenly come back. Virginia was looking at me in the same way.

Men began to move. No one had stirred a finger all that time. We could see Jesus talking with the man who had cried out.

And then he began to descend the steps, still holding the child with one arm, and the other over the shoulder of the man who came along beside him, his eyes lowered, his whole bearing like that of one who had met with a mighty experience. No one could interpret his look.