since it was capable of interpretation as admission of error. Suddenly a thought occurred to the clergyman. "Where are you stopping?"

"I sent my carpet-bag round to your boarding-place." "I warn you," said Craig, "that I have nothing with which to entertain visitors. I haven't a penny that 's my own."

"Have you taken a vow of perpetual poverty, as well?" demanded Barnaby, on whom the essential brutality of Craig's announcement made no real impress.

66

"I am God's trustee," Craig said. 'Whatever comes to me comes for His service."

"Which forbids its being spent on me. I understand. But your boarding-house keeper can lodge and feed me?"

"You must ascertain that for yourself." It was the negation of hospitality, so far as its material side was concerned; but to Barnaby that side had no meaning in the absence of the informing spirit which he saw was absolutely impossible to the position Craig had chosen to occupy in the world. He felt no resentment: he did not even admit that his pride was hurt or his feelings outraged. "The foxes have holes; and the birds of the air nests," he could hear Craig saying; "but I have not where to lay my head." Was he to quarrel with him? It would have seemed to him a contest that concerned only the paltry price of his day's or week's board.

After supper, Craig sat with Barnaby for an hour on the grass in front of the house and then went to his room, without asking Barnaby to accompany him. The latter walked down the highway to the long curve where they had met the girl, and gazed away to the north, with an unspoken wonder as to which of the rare lights that twinkled among the hills was that of the Seagrave farm.

When he got back to the house, the widow Marlow was waiting to show him to his room.

"Can you board me for a week or two?" he asked sharply.

"I've only got the spare room" she hesitated · "an' ef I should have comp'ny

"Are you expecting company?" he asked.

"No, not exactly expectin', leastwise not in the nex' day or two. But Mr. Marlow's brother hain't ben here sence Mr. Marlow died, an' he hain't said as he was comin' jest now, but ef he should, I would n't want not to hev a bed fur him

"How long since Mr. Marlow died?" asked Barnaby, thinking it possibly a recent occurrence.

"It'll be thirty-one year, come August."

"I think we are taking no great risk," he said, holding his face without a smile: "and moreover, I'll agree, if he comes, to slip away and leave you the room. I want to stay a fortnight or so, and I'll give you four dollars a week, if that's enough."

"Laws, I could n't think o' axin more 'n three; an' I don't reckon it 's wuth more 'n that; though I might, o' course, gin you so'thin' extry now an' then fur supper."

Barnaby recognised the mandate of Yankee thrift contending with Yankee honesty for the possession of the extra dollar, and realised that he must throw his weight with the first contestant.

"You know they always charge more for anyone that stays a little time; and then I'm likely to be a bit troublesome and particular. I guess you'd do well to take my offer."

"Wall, ef you put it that away, p'raps I'd better: but ef you don't get what you want, 't 'll be your own fault,

an' ye must n't blame me. I hain't ben used to takin' keer of a man fur thirty year, till the pahson, he come goin' on two year ago, but thet don't seem to help much, for he's thet queer that sometimes, ef he was n't a min'ster, I'd think he war n't jest right. Anyway, nobody would n't larn nothin' 'bout takin' keer of a man, 'cause they'd hed him to board."

CHAPTER VI

THE TWO FARMS

HERE was no phase of the life of the people among

THE

whom he had come to serve that was not thoroughly familiar to Craig. In all essentials, the community was a duplicate of that in which he was raised. In knowledge of his own past, he read these lives - the dumb, dull isolation and loneliness of youth; the sordid worldliness of middle life; the hopeless vacuity of age. He needed none to tell him of the temptations to which these lads were exposed; of the dangers alike to boys and girls in the freedom of country life; of the scars and woundings from the conflicts with material ill through which these dull, routine-burdened men and women had come. He read the turbulence of animal passion surging under the stolidity of these heavy-faced boys, who were already men in their knowledge of much of which town lads only guess. He saw, in the light of experience, opportunity walking hand in hand with precocious knowledge, unrestrained of judgment or the preventing grace which was the Christian's shield.

These things, however, lay in the realm of overt doing, not of speculative scepticism. They were not a call to doctrinal discourse, for there was no doctrinal unsoundness. In the face of orthodox belief, his preaching, like that of those who ignore orthodoxy as valueless, dealt almost wholly with conduct. He combatted the allurements of material sin with the material horrors of hell and the sufferings of the damned, wasting no time in

the pleasant task of proving what no one disputed. It was not that his hearers did not know the right from the wrong, but that, under the common heritage of Adam's children, they preferred sin and would follow it, unless they were driven into the paths of righteousness by the terror of punishment.

There was, therefore, nothing in his experience to fit him to deal with disbelief, avowed as Barnaby had avowed it. In his wildest moments, before conversion, he had never doubted the truths of Christianity, or the penalty that waits on sin. He had been the conscious law-breaker, never the denier of the law. He found it, moreover, difficult to shape argument to sustain that which is beyond argument. Indeed, he found argument impossible, and he simply dogmatised, overlooking the fact that dogma and assertion are essentially one to him whose first position is denial of dogma.

He had no fear for his parishioners. They would be as prompt as he to resent Barnaby's doctrinal heresies, in which there was nothing to arouse dormant imagination, which develops only along lines that define daily experience. His relation to Barnaby's scepticism was, therefore, without complication on this account. Neither was there any element of personal attachment, for he had never responded to the overtures which the lad had constantly made. In his absence, he was not conscious of ever having remembered his existence.

These conditions, instead of diminishing, enhanced the intensity of feeling aroused by the encounter. Stripped of all extraneous accidents, the naked fact confronted him of a soul buried in sin and doomed to eternal death. It was as if God sought to measure his devotion to His work as a thing abstract from all personality, and as he realised the greatness of the demand,