CHAPTER XX

"BLACK AS THE PIT"

It was Friday afternoon that the riot took place. It was now Sunday morning, and the first day of April. The sun was shining gloriously. Birds were chirping in the bare trees. The first springing green was giving life to the rectory lawn. But the rector of Christ Church, looking out from his window toward the street, neither saw nor heard these signs of the wakening season. The sound of the tolling church bell struck upon his ears. He knew that the hour for morning service was approaching, but the knowledge gave him little concern. His children were playing in the hall. He paid no heed to them. It was not that he was ill in body, but that he was sick in soul. His wound had been severe, but it had not placed his life in jeopardy. A glancing blow from a flying brick that had crashed through the glass panel of the door behind him had first laid his scalp open to the bone. He was still weak from the shock of the blow and from loss of blood. But prompt and skilful surgical attention, and a robust constitution, were bringing him rapidly back into his customary form. It was not the result of the violent and brutal assault upon his body from which he was suffering to-day; it was rather the awakening knowledge of what that assault implied. The toilers for whose sake he had dared the displeasure of the powerful, the oppressed for whom he had pleaded and fought, the poverty-stricken whose sufferings he had relieved with his own hands and out of his own pittance, had repudiated and repulsed him, and finally had stoned him. Could ingratitude reach greater depths? Had