The impulse was strong upon Ashgrave to seize the opportunity which the clergyman thus offered him, and through confession attempt to retrace the steps of his descent. He had a sense of shame that another should have courage to own a wrong committed and submit himself to the judgment of the church, while he remained silent in his greater sin. Yet, when he attempted to speak, two things barred him; the one, knowledge of the hostility of the tribunal with which judgment rested; the other, consciousness of the blacker sin that rested on his soul and which he easily persuaded himself he had no right to confess, since confession was betrayal of another. So he left the meeting, still silent, and with a feeling of new resentment stirring in his heart toward the man who had placed him in the position of a coward and a sneak to his own consciousness.

CHAPTER XVII

THE SENTENCE OF SIN

THE

HE shaft which Craig had shot reached a mark the very existence of which he did not dream. Although she knew, and she alone save Ashgrave and the clergyman, the purpose of the words, they seemed to Amanda Seagrave winged only for her soul. "Therefore, if there be any here who is conscious of sin, I call upon him to make confession thereof or else take not upon himself the greater damnation that fell upon him who betrayed the innocent blood!" In those words, she heard herself forbidden the sacred table, shut out from the communion, excommunicate of the church; and the mystical force of the sentence was the more potent because she knew that the speaker had no suspicion of its meaning to her soul. Before her passed the strange sequence of events that had led to the pronouncement of this terrible sentence, directed of man to one mark, and turned by God against herself. For Ashgrave and his sin of profanity, it was the voice of an earthly pastor; for her, it was the voice of God, speaking by the mouth of His servant who knew not himself the import of the message.

The intense nervous tension of the days since she read in her chamber the mystic message which brought her not merely forgiveness, but as well obliteration. of her sin, had been for her a state of exaltation, from which she read into life meaning and beauty it had never possessed before. The vague and insatiable longings

of one who pauses on the threshold of womanhood and looks back with fondness and forward with hope, had turned to darkness and dread before the consciousness of unpardonable sin, only to be transmuted into the beatific vision of the miracle of forgiveness. Love, human and divine, compassed her to the washing away of sin. Accustomed from childhood to the symbolic language of the Hebrew writers, informed anew with the literal directness of the descendants of the Puritans, she found nothing in her experience for which her entire religious training did not prepare her. Forgiveness and the washing away of sin: to disbelieve their possibility would be to deny religion itself.

No influence, less mystical than that which wrought her exaltation, could have brought that doubt which, because it was doubt, was certainty. Divine purpose alone could have shaped the message, where the messenger had no hint of its esoteric purport. The sentence of excommunication had been spoken by lips that could not have interpreted the words. Every living force that had been sweeping on the current of joyance was suddenly stopped and turned back upon itself to be converted into the force of destruction. For the moment reason itself was staggered, and her one prayer was to hide herself and die.

Under this stress, the girl's protection was the absolute inability of her parents to reach her mood by analysis or interpretation. In a horse-trade, her father would have treated the surface indications as insignificant. In the attempt to comprehend a soul, the occult was non-existent. To her mother, despondency, fear that manifested itself by abnormal nervous irritation, suggested only the need of a purgative. Amanda's experience taught her that she was safe with her self

revelation until she elected, or conscience forced, publicity.

She was, thus, as absolutely isolated, in the crisis into which she was suddenly drawn, as if she were the only created being. Yet in her isolation the dominant force was the tradition of a personal deity who guided and, at times, interfered in the most trivial details of life. It thus seemed to her no incongruous thing that the Master Power of the universe directly concerned itself in her acts, especially since she weighed them, not in their relation to the universe, but by their importance in her own experience.

The development of such a mood, departing from the intense practicability of the life about her, was action, the test of purpose in temporal affairs, the touchstone of genuineness in regeneration. Conversion was not merely abandonment of sin and turning to righteousness, but an actual physical process that attested itself through overt experience. Whatever a spiritual mood might

become, it began in doing.

Her intense nervous excitement and distress of mind made, therefore, for action. Convicted of sin, the question of repentance as a mere spiritual state, of redemption through abandonment of sin and a growth in righteousness, found no lodgment in her mind. As, when she deemed herself forgiven, she saw forgiveness complete in its very inception, so now, when she knew herself condemned, punishment, as the wages of sin, became necessary and, necessarily, immediate. She realised that Barnaby had been possible only through the judgment, "neither do I condemn you"; that condemnation was his banishment.

She stole away from the house on Monday afternoon and took her way through the hills toward Ashgrave's

farm. As short a time as she had known Barnaby, it was startling how each spot, with which she was familiar from childhood, seemed never to have existed, save with relation to him. There was scarcely a rod of ground she traversed, scarcely a bower of trees, or a clump of brightleaved laurel or massed brambles that did not plead for him. Her way was a Gethsemane to her soul; the broad way of death to her love.

Ashgrave was at work in his fields, stilling, by the anodyne of tremendous physical accomplishment, the mental and spiritual conflict that was dominant in brain and soul. With no single physical or spiritual function moderately developed, his suffering was as intense as his passions, and the scene in meeting the day before had set every chord vibrating with an agony that might as readily become repentance as brutality.

He was startled by the girl's approach, which he interpreted alone from the viewpoint of his own public abasement, of her self-sharing in which he had no conception. He left the field and, joining her at the gate, walked across the grass toward the house. On her part, she was too concentrated in her own spiritual mood to ask of his. Her purpose came with the rush of words that stayed for nothing.

"Our sin has made us one," she said, "and it is useless not to recognise it. I've come to live with you from now. I'm your wife; my place is here."

It was what he had urged and begged a hundred times, and she as many refused, bidding him wait. Now she threw it at his feet, as if the worthless gift had its old value! She had guiled him, perhaps even to the loss of his own soul, and now came to offer him, as worthless, that for which he had sinned. An insane anger seized him that she should think he could be trifled with