stood, half shamed of his act, yet glad. She trembled, with knowledge of herself, such as came to our first parents in the Garden.

"You must go away," she said.

"Must!" He laughed at the folly of the word.

"Yes," she said, "must, and at once."

"And if I don't?"

"I shall go and live with my husband."

CHAPTER XXXVII

D

ASHGRAVE CLAIMS HIS OWN

URING the three days which followed the Sunday of the sermon against the Roman Church, there were ominous growlings and mutterings when men met and stopped for a minute's chat. Fear was heavy upon them, and the heavier because they had always before thought of the Roman power, if they thought of it at all, as a distant, intangible something that was a plague and a menace for a great many years, but had ceased to be of much account since an indefinite something, named the Reformation, occurred.

Now suddenly it lowered portentous, a very miracle of danger, striking boldly at the church in Padanaram itself!

The whisper went abroad that the Papist must go. That was the very least that an outraged community could demand; but that must be demanded sharply and imperatively, to the end that there should be no mistaking the meaning.

As dusk fell, a group of half-grown boys gathered in front of the post office, with low whisperings among themselves, as if to hide their purpose even while making it known. They moved toward the cross-road that led to Ashgrave's farm, and here a boy and there a man, drawn by some silent summons that filled the air, swelled the number. Bill Holden and Si Patterson developed out of the distances, and learned with horror of the menace to the Protestant faith, a menace the more

startling because their intimacy with Ashgrave had made them almost, although innocently, abettors therein. There were nearly fifty in the throng when, from the hilltop, they caught sight of the farmhouse, lonely in the vast expanse of the night. A cry burst from them; the cry of the hunting pack when in sight of the quarry.

The tumult of his wild blood was awake in Ashgrave again that night. Under it was a cry for companionship that life had not given him. The Canadian boy had been a godsend, but there is a hunger in man that man may not supply. There is something in this deeper than the mere cry of animal lust. It is not sin, even, unless nature be sin.

Others had laughed at his love for Amanda Seagrave, but he never had. He had scouted it; shut his heart to it; betrayed it; done everything save laugh; and it had come to him that of all things that had entered into or gone out of his life, this had least in it to call for laughter. Without it, life was hopelessly empty. With it, it seemed almost possible that even he might make something of life.

All day long at the heavy work, which never tired him, he had striven for self-analysis, which was always wearisome. His tremendous physical strength craved labour, as his stomach craved food, and he found absolute physical pleasure in the mere fact of doing, irrespective of its results. As a man of less vitality, failing to understand this craving and the joy of gratification, might also have failed to believe, so a man of lesser passions must have failed to understand the terrible tide of lust which, at its flood, was dominant beyond denial. Out of the laboratory of time he had been turned, master of labour and procreation, and nature is no such bungler as not to leave the man better, physically, in the fulfilment of his functions.

Could he compass life within this fulfilment and the relationships which it involved? Dim in the morning of days lay the faint memory of maternal love and the darkness of the terror of that night which had robbed him at once of mother and father. He had not consciously found the years of isolation which followed so terrible, perhaps because in him the greatness of experience replaced the boy's need of companionship before maturing functions awakened the demands of manhood. At least his life had given him development of his great frame under healthful labour that, for the time, seemed to meet all needs.

And yet all self-analysis led, like a hidden, crooked path, to this "yet." From his father and mother each he had inherited something more than this great body, instinct with the desire to toil and to reproduce itself, or he might have been happy in toil and reproduction. Out of some early experience his father had brought across the waste shreds and tatters of a broader taste of life than his fellows, one evidence of which was a small collection of books strange to this practical community, which had been the companions of many a long evening passed in the company of his half-demented father. These too, as well as this long isolation, his superb bodily health had taken to itself, less as poison than food; yet they had stirred to life something that had called and not been answered, or at least so little answered as to seem the echo of its own call or the laugh of mocking Tantalus.

In his ignorance, he sought answer from the most earthly of associations into which awakening hunger plunged him in his unguided adolescence; but he had sought it as well from the church, the visible centre about which the life of his community circled and which was never, in its organised entity, long silent in any of

the affairs of life. Then, the first whisper came in the dance of a girl's laughing eyes and the music of a girl's laughing voice, and he dreamed that he had found the secret good that lay at the heart of life.

It seemed to him to-day that he had not been wrong in holding that this awaking was of that which had remained unstirred of all his other experiences, and that it would have remained on an entirely different plane, had not accident come as the handmaid of anger, and, perhaps, jealousy, to toss it into the arena to be ravened by passion and despoiled of lust.

It would have been held a sign of non-regeneration by his associates that he looked at his act, not from the standpoint of a wrong committed, but as of a loss sustained. It was through her eyes he had caught his first glimpse of a world to which he also had believed himself heir, and by one wanton act his inheritance was lost. There had never been a moment when he did not clearly mark the difference in his relation to her and to other women, and surely she owed something to it that when he had urged marriage she held herself back, until opportunity, coupled with temptation, came to the begetting of disaster. Had she no part in this? Did it lay obligation on him alone? He forgot that she had offered herself, and he had refused. He remembered only that he was denied. At the fast-locked door he stood, whose hands had turned the bolt and thrown away the key.

With the indirectness of a countryman, who goes at no enterprise by a straight road when another can be found, Ashgrave strolled into the Seagrave barn and stood watching the boys and the hired man at their chores. The swinging lantern gave a circle of light in the mist of shadows, out of which a grunt of recognition did duty for