Released at last from his attendance as a witness, he found the solace of departure, which stared him in the face, in the fact that it gave him excuse for seeing her which even she, with regard to what had passed between them, could not deny. On that he must base his claim without flinching, sacrificing even the delicacy that forbids such use of service done, to the more urgent right of a parting interview. He pitted the wrong of denial against that of violated delicacy, and without even deceiving himself as to the partiality or impartiality of his judgment, refused to abate his claim.

"The farce might have been shorter in the playing," he said the day he came to take leave, "if they had only said in the first place that they were going to prove that while there was a riot there was nobody in it."

"The waiting must have been very dull," she said. "Yes," he admitted, "because you would n't see me."

"It was better for us both," she answered sadly.

He caught at the substance of the words, without the possible comfort they implied.

"That's always the way!" he cried. "It's better, it's better, it's better! Deny yourself something you want, and maybe you'll get something else you don't care a snap for."

"I was not thinking that," she said. "I was not thinking of getting, only of your being spared pain.”

"But I wanted to see you; I wanted to be with you; I wanted to comfort you. Could there be any greater pain than to be denied this?"

He struck the note of his personal loss, the note of assured selfishness, and inasmuch as it excluded her for the moment, she could feel with him the enormity of the denial he had undergone.

"I'm so sorry," she said, and the sorrow was a hundredfold more in the look than in the simplicity of words.

"Then make it good, and I'll stay!"

A look of alarm came into her face, a fear born of distrust of herself and her wish for him, if he stayed. He read it as the spontaneous expression of her wish that he should go.

"I thought," he added, covering the crassness of his selfishness with a thin veneer of thought for her, "that it might be something to you just to have me here."

"Oh you don't know, you can't know, how much it would be if only I dared."

"What are you afraid of?" he asked in wonder. "Of you, of myself, of us both."

Then he laughed, more joyously than for many a day. "If that's the trouble," he answered, "then your fear is my courage."

Every show of hope on his part was, however, an alarm to her conscience, which stood guard not simply on the abstract questions of right and wrong, but rather as the mentor of her love to protect the rights of the loved one. That joy of sacrifice, which was to her the spirit of love that would have urged her to give all, had she wherewith to give, became fear when she saw him, whom she loved, ready to clasp it that he might take her, who had lost all, into his life.

"You must not have courage," she exclaimed, "except to tear yourself from me.'

"Do you love me?" When all argument was denied, he came back to the simple demand.

"You must not ask," she said, weak to deny as to confess.

"Why? Because you would be spared the pain of denial?"

"No, a hundred times, no," she cried in the intensity of her fear that he would doubt her, then checking herself in a panic of fear at the meaning of her words.

She had, however, said all in saying this much, and he simply came back to the plainest of declarations: "Then I stay!"

So the afternoon wore away, while he ranked the inertia of his refusal to heed her warnings as the ally of the love she was too weak and at the same time too strong to deny. At last, he broke down her guard, and for the strength of her commands she substituted the weakness of pleading, and so won momentarily.

"Please go," she said. "I could not listen now, even if I would. I was his wife, something is due to that." "I will give all you ask to that," he said "only I must know that when I have given, I may hope."

"When you have gone," she said, "you may come again if you want to, then."

"If I want to? Do you think my love is made of such stuff?"

"It were better for you if it was," she hesitated. "Well, it is n't," he answered sharply. "I shall come again."

"But you will go now? And," interrupting him as he would have spoken, "when you are away, and before you come back, think, think of everything." She covered her face with her hands, and now he knew that his silence on the greatest event of her life had been, not solace to memory, but its refreshment, and that she imputed it to fear on his part to face the fact and not as evidence that, so far as his love and acts were concerned, the fact did not exist.

CHAPTER XLVI

THE FINDING OF A SOUL

IMEON CRAIG sat under the sloping roof of his

bare chamber, verifying his accounts and apportioning his quarterly salary, just received, to the various purposes originally designated and since rigidly adhered to. The room was shabbier than of old, and his garments were worn and shiny, as it is the nature of black to become. None the less, there had been no wavering in the past and there was none now. He would gladly have pared a few dollars off the scanty portion of his income originally set aside for his own uses, but he had gauged them so accurately at the beginning to his barest necessities that this was impossible.

ure.

He was yet too young not to face the future. He was too honest with himself not to own that that future held for him nothing of which the past did not give the measHis parish was of the narrowest, with no enlarging interests. Bound in the circle of their daily round, his parishioners addressed themselves to the saving of their souls as to the saving of their hay crop, because they belonged to themselves and the loss would be theirs. Yet it was the field in which his labour must lie. Broader parishes do not seek in such as these men to do their broader work, and even if they did, there was nothing in his experience here to fit him for larger effort. He must, perforce, grow narrow under the narrow influences that surrounded him, and the best he had to look to was the time when he should be content. Unable to make broad

his work, it must in the end narrow him to its own

measure.

When he reached this point, he started with a consciousness of how far he had travelled from the simple enthusiasm with which he had taken up the work of the ministry. Then the assurance that, under his pastorate, a single soul would be turned from darkness to light, would have seemed to him abundant reward for the work of a lifetime spent amid sordid want and the denial of every aspiration, save that for God. Now? He rose and took from the table the Bible and turned its pages in half fearing wonder.

Restless and uneasy under a sense of self-condemnation, he seized his hat. Striking across the fields, he gained the heights that lay between the Seagrave and the Ashgrave farms. Summer had mantled with green the ruins of barn and homestead, and now autumn was making way again for the barrenness and desolation that winter would bring. He recognised the spot with a start at the direction his restless wish for breadth of air and sunlight had taken him. It was not, however, to quibble or hesitate at the underlying fact. Here was the cause of his changed relation to the work of his parish. He had come to it a priest, but in one woman's eyes had seen that which made him remember he was a The knowledge had never left him, though he had striven to bury it under text and sermon and the drudgery of his priestly duties, now grown dreary.

man.

He had saved souls and presented them to God. He had preached sermons that found the joints in the proof armour of indifference, and stirred old professors of the Word, until they came again to the Mercy Seat, with the fervour of hope that was the riches of a soul in its earliest love. But his own hope, his own faith, his own love?