"I won't say that, for I know you would. I'm going."

"If you go without opening that door and saying we 're friends, it's the end of everything between us. It was the dominant note now; the masterhood of might and position.

"I can't do that, Joe;" and he read in the tone the fear his words had roused. "You can come to-night." "If you won't trust me now, you'll never have another chance." He held firm to his vantage.

So back and forth came and went answer and plea, till, gradually dropping the masterful manner, he pleaded at last in the name of his love and loneliness.

"You don't know what it is to live all alone. If you did, you'd come to me without waiting. I feel sometimes I should go wild. Why don't you love me?"

"Oh Joe, you know I do. I'd come now, only father and mother

'What are they, if you love me?" He was the brute again in his anger. Then, checking this tone, he took up the pleading. "You won't go without a kiss, 'Mandy? Oh, 'Mandy, if you knew, if you knew! I know I'm savage; but who would n't be, living all alone? Your being here, where you ought to be always, where you belong, where you 've got to be, and be always; it drove me wild. I did n't know what I was doing; but 't was you, you, 'Mandy. Nobody else could. Oh, 'Mandy, 'Mandy! I love you, I love you! I can't, I can't wait!"

The picture of his loneliness, conjured in his words, overwhelmed him. He seemed to himself utterly deserted, and a great gasp of pity for his desolateness welled up from his chest. That cry of his soul in desolation accomplished all of which his words and pleadings

had failed. The bolt was forced back, the door opened, and the girl stood on the threshold, looking down on him where he knelt beside the door. He sprang to his feet, seized her in his great arms, and ravished kisses from her, unresisting.

CHAPTER IX

ΟΝ

THE SABBATH-DAY

N SUNDAY, the hosts of the Lord came up to Padanaram to the preaching. From the tired farm-wife to the toddlekins of two years; from the sunwearied farmer to the lusty lad to whom the flash of the river was invitation, there was not one to whom it was not a task. It was a throng lashed by an inherited concept of duty, in which the living spirit was long since dead. The task was flavoured, not lessened, by the social instinct, and the hope, old as Mars Hill, of something new in the sermon of the stranger; for only a few had yet learned that he was not a clergyman.

Ashgrave came, driven of devils, that had tormented him since the day of Barnaby's and Amanda Seagrave's visit. When the reaction came from the crisis of that tremendous hour, it seemed to him that he had broken down walls that had concealed himself and, for the first time in his life, he looked into the deeps of his own soul. The sight had dazed, had horrified him. He was afraid, not of others, but of himself. He knew there was no wrong that a man could do of which he was not capable.

Amanda Seagrave came in the wild rage of concealment, and the equally wild hope of seeing Barnaby. She knew now that it was not Ashgrave who had caused that pulse of joy when the two men entered the kitchen, and in the moments left her as respite ere the question of her own future pressed for settlement, she was too womanly too human-to deny herself the hope

бо

that the chord of dead joy might thrill again, though it were never so feebly.

Whatever secrets other hearts bore with them to the preaching, these two were those whose cry for the priesthealer was the most poignant, and to these Simeon Craig answered with the text, "For there is none other name under heaven given among men whereby we must be saved." He builded his argument with the more perfection because with him argument was artificiality. As a rule he drove to the end with a directness that forced obstacles aside rather than surmounted them, and left clear and defined the end itself, whatever might be said of the line of thought by which it was reached. The heroism of such method would have responded to the demand of their hurt, and instead he gave them platitudes.

Even Barnaby failed to understand the sermon, guessing a tragedy which he made no attempt to measure. The uncompromising critics, with the feeling of loss of the weekly excitation of fear, were outspoken in charging weakness, and the two sick souls who were looking Eternal Death in the face, turned away faint with the sting of indifference.

Barnaby strove, at the close of the service, for a chance to speak to Miss Seagrave, and when he saw that she was plainly purposed to avoid him, he turned instead to Ashgrave, who greeted him heartily and seemed to cling to him. The man was clearly not a favourite with the elder people, and while the half-grown lads thronged about him, it was with a show of fear, as if the attraction was in doing a forbidden thing. Ashgrave had, apparently, walked, and Barnaby kept pace with him, chatting, as he left the church-yard, answering only the scant nods of recognition given him.

Ashgrave paused at the wall, where a footpath crossed the fields in his home direction.

"If you care to come," he said, come. I'm always there. You see my popularity."

"You 're more like Craig than any one I ever met," said Barnaby, speaking his revolt against the two men, rather than answering the half invitation.

"Alike! I'd like to preach one sermon Do you think men would forget it?" "What would be your text?"

- just one!

"Hell!" The word was like a cry from the very soul of the man. It was a cry of terror, a confession of sin, all that the heart could utter, save the plea for salvation.

"Don't you think they've had enough of that?” asked Barnaby, seeking to break the strain of the impression made on him.

"Enough!" He leaped the wall and strode away without turning his head again.

"I would n't have too much to do with young Ashgrave, if I were you." Craig threw out the hint as they were at dinner, a meagre meal, without an article of Sabbath cooking or warming.

"Do you know, if I was his clergyman, I would n't think I could have too much to do with him." Barnaby felt the secret soul of the man in the cry he still heard.

"The physician forbids others the patient he himself strives to cure. There is no hour of the day or night that I'm not at Ashgrave's call. If I was sitting at the communion table, and he sent for me, I should leave and go."

"Do you think you would know if he did send for you?" demanded Barnaby. "Such men don't put their needs into words."

To Craig's material comprehension of intellectual or