A woman in a San Francisco audience of about a thousand had just heard that her brother, in the Army, had been tried, court-martialed and sentenced to six months at hard labour. She thought he was innocent but did not know the facts, and in the tellings where Neville answers her directly he refuses to take that up - I am not asking whether he is innocent; what do you want? She wanted him out, so he gave her the work and made her do it herself, so that she could give the praise to herself and not to him: if he were free, where would he go? Straight to her place. She lived upstairs and had to go down to the door. So she sat alone each morning over breakfast and lost herself in the imaginal state of the bell ringing, ran down the stairs, threw the door open and embraced her brother waiting there - for one solid week. The next Sunday, before the meeting, it happened; and at the meeting she could not restrain the impulse to rise, stood up in front of a thousand people and told the story. The case had been retried and he was honourably discharged, and he came home that Sunday morning. Neville uses it as his hardest case for the forgiveness of sin, and draws the mercy from it explicitly: whatever her brother did to warrant the court-martial, why must he pay the last ounce? If she could pull him out of the state that caused him to do it, he is not the same person - the same immortal soul in a different state - and God's mercy is precisely the intervention that stops all sin having to be expiated.