A gun and a hedge—no accident can be more common than that. Say you want to shoot some rats that have been showing their ugly whiskers in the field ditches; take your gun, well charged, and blow your brains out among the brambles of an untrimmed hedge.

Or these motor-cars! He thought of the way they came racing down the highroad from Old Manninglea. How would it be to wait for one of these buzzing, crashing, stinking road monsters over there on the edge of the heath, and jump out just in front of it? If one stooped down and took the full shock on one's forehead, it would mean a mess that there would be no patching together again. But one could not attempt that in daylight, because the driver would jam the breaks on, swerve round one, do anything desperate rather than run into one. And if he could not avoid one, he would tell everybody at the inquest that it was a plain suicide and nothing else. There would be passengers in the car too, who would also swear to its being a suicide. And at night these traveling cars have such powerful head-lamps that the roadway is lighted up for a hundred yards in front of them. Even at night, they would recognize it as suicide.

Toward dusk every evening external things became more real, and his hold on life tightening, he suffered more acutely in each hour that passed. Night after night he went back to Hadleigh Wood. It was the wood of despair, the focal point of all his pain, and he was drawn to it irresistibly through the gathering darkness.

On the second evening he found it difficult to get away. Mavis stopped him, asked him some domestic question, and then began to talk about a new suit of clothes for their boy. He was alive again now, emerged from his somnambulistic state, and he gave full attention to this matter of Billy's new serge suit; nevertheless, all at once she apologized for troubling him, and inquired if he had anything on his mind.

"No, Mav, of course not."

"Are you sure, Will? Do tell me if you've something worrying you."

"What should I have to worry me?" and he put his arm round her ample waist, and gave her an affectionate squeeze.

"The hay's all right, isn't it?"

"Yes, everything is all right.... You can't do better than you've suggested about Billy. Take him with you to Manninglea—and, look here, if Mr. Jones can't fit him properly out of stock, let him make the suit to measure. Don't consider the extra expense. We can afford it."

"Thank you, Will." Mavis was delighted. "You've told me to do the very thing I wanted to do; but of course I'd never have done it without your authority. I've been longing to see the little chap in clothes regularly cut out and finished for him, and nobody else."

Going through the yard Dale was stopped by his men. The foreman wanted directions for to-morrow's work; the carter asked for three new tires; the stableman regretted to be compelled to report that one of the horses had broken his manger rack.

As he finally came out on the road, Dale was thinking, "Soon now I shall be gone, but everything here will be just the same. They will all of them find that they can do very well without me: the men, the children, Mavis—yes, even Norah. Mavis will be the one who will grieve for me. Norah will suffer most, but it will be only for a little while. She'll take another sweetheart—a real sweetheart this time, and she'll marry, and give birth to babies; and it will be to her as if I had died a hundred years ago, as if I had never lived at all, as if I'd been somebody she'd read of in a story-book, or somebody she'd dreamed about in one of those silly nasty sort of dreams which young girls can't help having, but are ashamed to remember and always try to forget."

Mavis, however, would wish to remember him, and be sorry when she found his image fading. She would struggle to keep it bright and fresh. She would grieve long and sincerely—and then she would be quite happy. She wouldn't marry again; she wouldn't do anything foolish. "No," he thought, "she'll just devote herself to the bairns, working for them late and early, and managing the business as well as I have managed it myself. She'll be cheated a bit here and there, as a woman always is—but, all said and done, she'll do very well without me. Customers will support her—the word will go round. 'Don't let's turn our backs on the widow of that poor fellow Dale.'"

And he thought, with a bitterness of heart that almost made him sick, that perhaps after his death many people might speak well of him; that certainly in the little world of Vine-Pits Farm and the Cross Road cottages there would be a natural inclination to exaggerate his few good qualities and be gentle to his innumerable faults; so that a sort of legend of virtue would weave itself about his memory, making him a humble, insignificant, but local saint—to be placed at a respectful distance and yet not too far from the shrine of that great and illustrious saint the late Mr. Barradine. "Of course," people might say, "one was a grand gentleman, and the other only a common fellow who had raised himself a bit by hard work; but both of 'em were good kind men, and both no doubt have met with the reward of their goodness up there in Heaven."

As soon as he got into the wood he hurried as rapidly as he could toward Kibworth Rocks; and then when he got near them he walked slowly up and down the ride, with his head bowed and his hands clasped behind his back. And each evening the same thing happened. Visions of Norah assailed him; he passed again through the tortures of yearning desire that he had felt when he first read her letter; and he said to himself, "If proof was wanted, here's the proof. This would show me, if I didn't know already, that I must do it."

In imagination he saw her sitting alone on a balk of timber by the sea. Her hands lay loose in her lap; her neck was bent; her whole attitude indicated dejection, loneliness, sadness. She was thinking about him. She was thinking, "How cruel of him not to answer my sad little letter. He can't be so busy but what he could have found time to send me a few lines with his own hand. Just half a sheet of paper would have been enough—with one or two ink crosses at the end, to show me he prized the kisses that I put in my letter to him. It was brutal, yes, and cowardly, to make Mrs. Dale write instead. If Mrs. Dale hadn't written telling me he'd received my letter, I couldn't have found it in my heart to believe that he'd treat me so abominably cruel."

And, groaning, he spoke to this mental picture that he had evoked for his renewed torment. "Norah, my sweet one, I can't help myself. Commands have been laid upon me. I'm no longer free to do what I please. Norah, don't look away from me. Turn to your boy—let him see your dear eyes, though the sight of them makes him bleed." And the thought-picture obeyed him. He saw the entrancing oval of the face instead of its delicate profile, looked into the profound beauty of her eyes, felt that her warm red lips were close in front of him, and that he would go raving mad if they did not come closer still and let him kiss them.

After such spasms of burning pain he was temporarily exhausted; he felt completely emptied of emotional power, as if his nerves had delivered so fierce a discharge that they must cease from working until time and repose had allowed them to replenish themselves. Then, so long as this state lasted, his love for the girl was deprived of all material for passion; it was as though the highest thinking part of him had been cut off from the sensational mass, and only the top of his head served to keep alive his memory of the girl.

Then he thought of her with a fantastic longing that seemed to him beautiful, immaterial, and innocent. He said to himself, "I don't shirk my punishment. I'm going to take it. But fair's fair—There's no occasion to make myself out worse than I really am. Norah has taken hold of me a great deal more by my int'lect than by the low animal kind of feelings that are the mark of the abject sinner. I can't live without her; but if I might live with her, I feel I could be content to let it all remain quite innocent between us. Yes, I feel I could be happy with her just as a companion, provided she and I were alone together, far away from everybody else—yes, I'd take my happiness on those terms, that she was never to be anything else to me but just that."

But soon those treacherous nerves restored themselves, the upper and lower parts of him were all one again, and the diffuse yet darting pain returned. Anger came too. It seemed that the dead man mocked him, went on softly laughing at him.

"What a humbug you are"—he gave the dead man words—"what a colossal humbug. You and your nice Sunday go-to-meeting thoughts. It's so easy, isn't it? to dress up one's rottenness in pretty sentimental twaddle. But you don't deceive anybody. You don't even deceive yourself, not for three minutes at a stretch. You know that underneath all your humbugging pretenses the black sin is unchanged. You are no better and no worse than I was. You are exactly the same as me."

And Dale, breaking his own rule, or forgetting in his anger that he had refused to discuss things with this imaginary voice, answered wrathfully.

"This girl cares for me—that's the difference between us. She offers me love. And that's something you never had."

"How do you know?" said the dead man. "Your Mavis was one of many. And, besides, don't be so sure that Mavis wasn't fond of me. She never ran away from me. She came when I whistled for her."

Dale brandished his arms wildly, turned round, and stared at the pine-trees and the bracken. It seemed to him that some imperishable essence of the man was really here, mingling with the shadows, floating in the dusky air; and that possibly over there among the rocks, if one went to look for it, one might see a simulacrum of the man's bodily shape—perhaps only a gray shadowy outlined form, the odious stranger of dreams, but more vague than in the dreams, stretched on his back, holding up his blood-stained boots, and grinning all over his battered face.

"Yes, perhaps so," said the voice. "But I notice that you don't come in to look for me. You keep to the ride still. Now you've got so very close to me, why do you turn shy of the last little bit? Is it that you wish me to save you trouble by showing myself?"

And Dale made gestures of semi-insane fury, and spoke in a loud, hoarse voice.

"Yes, show yourself if you want to. You 'aarve my leave. Come out an' stan' here before me. I'm not afraid of you—now or hereafter."

"Hereafter—hereafter—hereafter." As Dale moved away slowly, the dead man seemed to mock him, to laugh at him derisively. "Hereafter—yes, that's a big word. Yes, go and talk that out with God."

He went up one of the narrow tracks that led toward the dead man's Orphanage, intending to look at it and perhaps hear again the evening hymn; but before he got to those broken fences he turned and began to wander aimlessly through the trees. All his mind was now full of the awful thought of God, and of the eternal punishment to which he believed God had condemned him.

Christ had tried to save him; but the other two persons of the Holy Blessed and Glorious Trinity had interposed, had prevented Christ from holding any further communication with him, and together had issued the fearful decree. That was it. Christ had not deserted him; he had lost the right ever to approach Christ again. That accounted for everything—the unutterable desolation, the dark despair, the overwhelming necessity of death without one ray of hope.

All that lovely and comforting faith in the endless loving mercy of God the Son, the Redeemer of mankind, the Friend and sometime Comrade of man, was to prove useless to him; the gentle creed of the Baptists could not be applied to so vile a case as his; he was at handygrips with the dread Jehovah, the mighty Judge, the offended King of creation.

Three Persons and one God—yes, but such different Persons; and thinking of the triple mystery, he imagined that two of its component parts had probably seen through him from the very beginning of his religious fervor. Only the other part, the part that he wished was the whole, had believed in him and gone on believing in him until it was forbidden to do so any more.

The awe and reverence that he felt while he thought in this manner made him bow his head and keep his eyes humbly downcast, as one not daring to look upward to the heavenly throne; yet, profound and sincere as was his reverential awe, he unhesitatingly translated all the sublime mystery of the skies into the simple terms that alone possess plain meaning to man's limited intelligence. Nothing in the naturally courageous bent of his mind prevented him; everything in his experiences of the Baptists, with their constant habit of homely illustration, encouraged him to do so.

He imagined the First and the Third Persons of the Trinity seated royally but vaguely amid the clouds, all about them a splendor of light like that of sunset or dawn, melodious music faintly perceptible, exquisitely beautiful forms of angels rising on white wings, hovering obediently, fading obediently—but they themselves, the Lords of Life and of Death, the Masters of Time and Space, were two tangible concrete old men—two venerable wise old men—the ultimate strained extended conception of two powerful, honored, high-placed old men. And they talked as men would talk—not in the human vocabulary, but conveying to each other, somehow, human ideas—about the man William Dale.

It was at the period of his conversion or repentance or baptism, and they were speaking to each other of Their Beloved Son and His newest recruit. And God the Father seemed to say that He would hope for the best—although, as they Both knew, Christ was too easily imposed on. And God the Holy Ghost pursed His lips, and shook His head, and said, "Take it from Me, this fellow Dale will turn out badly"—seeming to add or explain that it was a mere pretense and no true repentance. "He has never repented of his crime. But of course he is anxious about his future, and would try any trick to escape the punishment he has richly deserved."

All this was terribly real to him, and he imagined the dread scene more strongly every moment. Those Two went on debating his case—becoming now so solidly presented to his imagination that he could see Them, the purple color of Their robes, the halo of light as in a painted window, Their forms, Their faces. God the Father was not unlike old Mr. Bates, except that He had a long beard and that there mingled with the candid dignity of His expression a consciousness of sovereign power. The Holy Ghost was clean-shaven, very thin, with sharp clearly-cut features as of somebody who does not enjoy robust health, and with a slight but painful suggestion of a Roman Catholic priest who habitually goes deep into private secrets and is never really satisfied until he has extracted the fullest possible confessions. He was the One that Dale had never so much cared about—the difficult member of the firm, the sleeping partner who never really slept, who professed to keep himself in the background, but who quietly asserted himself in important moments and proved infinitely the hardest of the Three.

And so it had been in this case. Since time is nothing, and then and now are all one, Dale imagined that while his Judges talked of him in Heaven his whole earthly career had flashed onward to its end; so that he and all that concerned him was disposed of at one continuous sitting. Thus, without a pause, the Holy Ghost was already saying, "You see I was right in my first view of the affair. Dale is disgracing himself again. Now You and I must not allow any further communication between Our dear Son and such an impostor."

Then Christ pleaded for him, prayed for mercy. Christ, although invisible, was certainly there, imploring mercy for the man he had trusted and loved; and, in spite of the fact that He remained unseen, His mere presence glorified and magnified the heavenly scene. The light grew softer and yet more supremely radiant; hosts of angels soared and hovered in vast spaces between the rolling clouds; a vibrating echo of the divine pity swept like music far and near.

But the Holy Ghost brought forward a large strongly-bound volume, opened it, and said very quietly, "Let Me show You what We have against him in the book." And at sight of the book Dale shivered and grew cold to the core of his spine. He knew perfectly well what was entered in the book, and he thought, "It stands to reason They could never get over that. I might have known all along that would do for me, an' there was no getting round it."

"This is his record," the voice of the implacable Judge continued; "not what I have attributed to him as secret thought, but words taken down as spoken by his own mouth. Having committed his crime, he had the calm audacity—to lay the blame on US.... Yes, here is the entry. This is the statement verbatim: 'It is the finger of God'."

And Christ seemed to plead in an agony of grief still strove to lighten the punishment of the pitiful worm that he had deigned to call His brother man. "Oh, he didn't mean it."

"He said it," replied the Holy Ghost, dryly.

"But he didn't think what he was saying—he has been sorry for it ever since."

"Yet, frankly," said the Holy Ghost, "I can not see that he has made a single effort to put things straight, by removing the blame to the proper quarter—that is, to himself."

Nevertheless, Christ still pleaded, could not be silenced, must go on struggling to save this one man—because He was the Savior of all men, because He was Christ. He was there, certainly, infallibly, although quite invisible—He was there, kneeling at the feet of the other Two, praying, weeping:—He was there, filling Heaven with inconsolable woe because, although His myriad suns shone bright as when He lighted them and His universe swung steady and true in His measureless void, one microscopic speck of dirt only just big enough to hold immortal life was in danger of eternal death.

All these imaginations were absolutely real to Dale, an approximate conception of the truth which he could not doubt; and he thought: "Need I wonder if I have not had the slightest glimpse of His face? It is my doom. Christ is cut off from me. So far as human time counts, the communication was broken that afternoon when I was seeming to see him as he rode into Jerusalem and my hankerings after Norah seemed to snap the thread.

"I was judged at that moment. It was my doom—never more, here or there, to look upon His face."



XXXV

It was the evening of another day; and Dale stood motionless in the ride, close to Kibworth Rocks.

The twilight was fading rapidly; clouds that had crept up from the east filled the sky, and presaged a dark and probably a stormy night. Every now and then a gust of angry wind shook the tops of the fir trees; then the air was still and heavy again, and then the wind came back a little fiercer than before. Dale felt sure that there would be rain presently, and he thought: "If his ghost is really lying in there, it'll get as wet as that first night when the showers washed away all the blood."

He stared and listened, but to-night he could not fancy that he heard the dead man calling to him. He could not invent any appropriate conversation. It seemed to him that the ugly phantom was refusing to talk, that it had become sulky, or that it was pretending not to be there at all in order to effect a most insidious purpose. Yes, that must be the explanation. It wanted to entice and lure him off the ride—to make him venture right in there among the rocks, so that he might be shown the thing that had haunted him in dreams.

"Very well," said Dale, "so be it. That's the idea. All right. I agree."

He did not, however, move for another minute or so. He was thinking hard, and listening eagerly. But he could hear no sound, could imagine no sound, other than that made by the wind.

Then he moved, and, examining the ground, made his way slowly from the ride to the rocks, thinking the while, "It's impossible to follow my exact footsteps, because things have changed—but this was about the line I took with him."

Forcing himself through a tangle of holly and hawthorn, he came out into the open space and his feet struck against stone. In front of him the rocks rose darkly against the waning light, and he began to clamber about among them, over smooth round surfaces, along narrow gullies, and by cruel jagged ridges, seeking to find the exact spot where he had left the dead body. "It was about here," he said, after a time. "It was close by here. Prob'bly down there, where the foxgloves and the blackberries have taken root. Anyhow, that's near enough. I've come as near as I can;" and he sat down upon the ledge just above this hollow, and looked about him, attentively, in all directions.

The wind had ceased to blow; not a leaf stirred; silence reigned over the strewn boulders. Downward, where the ground fell away to a deep chasm, everything was indistinct; to the west, beneath banked masses of cloud, the last glow of the sunset showed in blood-red bands, and on this side all the intervening trees were black as ink; all about him the shadows filled every hollow, and the rocks were like shoals or reefs above the surface of a stagnant sea.

The place was a wilderness, a solitude, the dead and barren landscape of dreams—quite empty, unoccupied, a place that even ghosts would shun. He sat thinking, and listening; and soon it occurred to him that, though all seemed so dead and so silent, this place was really full of life. He heard the faint buzz of belated bees questing in tufts of heather or foxglove bells, a bat flitted over his head, some small furred thing scuttled past his feet; and in the air there were thousands of winged insects, whose tiny voices one could hear by straining one's ears. Listening intently for such murmurs, he thought: "Perhaps really and truly one has not any right to kill the smallest of these gnats. All that stuff about self-protection, an' struggle for existence, is just fiddle-de-dee in so far's God's concerned. He never meant it, an' never will approve of it. It's just nature's hatefulness and cruelty—not permitted or intended, an' to be put right some day."

It grew darker and darker, and the shadows rose all round him till he was like a man who had climbed out of the gray sea upon the only rock that was not yet submerged. When he got up presently and looked down at the hollow where he believed the corpse had lain, he could no longer see it. It was gone, lost in shadow.

Then he knelt upon his rock, and prayed—offered up the last agonized prayer of a despairing human soul. "O God—have mercy on me just so far's this. Don't let me die hopeless. I've submitted myself into Your hands. I don't complain. I don't question. I'm going to do it. But don't send me out in total darkness. Give me a blink of light—just one blink o' light before I go."

Was it this that had been wanted, this that had been waited for—the true acknowledgment, the true submission, the cry for mercy of the repentant creature who has already tasted more than the bitterness of death?

He rose from his knees, and without once looking back left the rocks and came through the thicket to the ride. It grew darker, the clouds dropped still lower, and the wind again blew fierce and strong. He left the broad ride and sauntered along one of the narrow tracks. He could hear the wind as it tore through slender branches high above his head, but down here it did not touch him; and he strolled on slowly, feeling extraordinarily calm, full of a great reverence and wonder, not noticing external things because he wished to maintain this strange inward peace.

Then soon the voluminous but indefinite sensations of mental tranquillity concentrated their soothing messages to make the comfort of one definite thought, and Dale said to himself: "Christ has returned to me."

And then he saw Him—not for an instant believing that he really saw Him, that he had passed from the order of common facts into the realm of miracles, that the usual laws of heaven had been broken by a special material manifestation, or anything of that sort; but that he saw Him with the beautifully clear visualization for which he had longed and prayed. And it seemed to him that the power of his thoughts took a splendid leap, and that he could now understand everything that hitherto had been unintelligible and inexplicable. Very God, and very man. Yes, this was the man—a man after his own heart—the comrade with whom one could work shoulder to shoulder and never know fatigue—the unfailing friend whom one dared not flatter or slobber over, but the grip of whose hand gave self-respect and the glance of whose eyes swept the evil out of one's breast. And this was God too—the only God that men can worship without fear; Whose power is so great that it makes one's head split to think of, and Whose love is greater than His power.

And the voice of Christ seemed to speak to him, not by the channel of crudely imagined words, but in a transcendent joy that was sent thrilling through and through him.

"Then I need not despair," he said to himself. "That was the voice of Christ telling me to hope."

He strolled on with bowed head, and remembered the night when he sat in Mr. Osborn's little room, staring at the carpenter's bench, and struggling between belief and doubt. He had said: "I want to be saved. I want the day when you can tell me I have gained everlasting salvation." And Mr. Osborn had answered him: "The day will come; but it will not be my voice that tells you."

It was dark, but he did not mind the darkness. He walked on, not knowing where he was going, and time passed without his thinking Of the lateness of the hour. He had forgotten his wife and his home; he had forgotten Norah; he had forgotten all his pain.

Then the odd and unexpected character of an external object made an impression sufficiently strong to rouse him from his reverie, and he thought dreamily: "What is that? Why, yes, it is what I was asking for—a blink of light."

Suddenly, straight in front of him, he saw the gleam again. What could it be? Then something right ahead, in the darkness of the trees, a bright flicker—as might be made by a man waving a lantern. There it was again, but brighter than before, quite a long way off. And he walked on faster.

Then, looking up, he saw a red glow in the sky, and he thought: "The heath is on fire." He walked faster, saw a column of crimson smoke and a great tongue of flame above the pine trees, and thought: "It is much nearer than the heath. It must be right on the edge of the wood."

He ran now, and soon the track was brightly lighted and confused sounds grew plain—shouting of voices, the galloping of a horse, the clamorous ringing of a bell. The trees opened out and he was running along the high ground above those broken fences, looking down at the Orphanage gardens, at men clustered like black ants, at solid buildings that seemed to send forth sheets, lakes, and seas of flame.

He rushed down the slope, burst through wooden barriers and leafy screens, shouting as he came. In the glare on the upper terraces there were many people—men, women, children; some of the men vainly endeavoring to fix and work unused hose-pipes; others dragging away furniture, curtains, carpets that lay in heaps near the central hall; the greatest number of them struggling with ladders, advancing and recoiling in front of the low block at the further end of the building.

"Are they all out?" shouted Dale. "Have they all been got out?"

Terror-stricken voices answered as he passed. "There's seven they can't get at.... Seven have been left.... They're the little ones."

And running in the fiery glare, he thought: "Yes, mercy has been vouchsafed me. This is my chance."

All things were plain to him; there was nothing that he could not understand. This fire must have broken out in the low block he had passed, and at first it seemed insignificant; as a precautionary measure the girls were fetched out of that block; the bell had been rung, and a messenger was sent galloping to summon the engine and brigade which would not arrive for an hour; and the stupid guardians of the place had wasted precious minutes in what they considered another precaution only, carrying furniture from the big hall. Nothing was done at the further block, because that appeared to be in no danger. They hadn't reckoned with the wind. The wind had sent the fire licking up the woodwork, dancing over slates and tiles, springing at the roof of the hall; and all at once the far block was involved. A furnace blast of flame leaped at it, billowing waves of smoke rolled through it; and it crackled and screamed and blazed. The bigger girls had just time to escape; but the children, seven of the smallest, were left on the upper floor.

"It's Mr. Dale. Oh, Mr. Dale, 'tis pitiful. You can hear 'em squealin' up theer. Oh, Mr. Dale, sir, what can us do?"

The heat was tremendous, and as the men came staggering back they pushed him away. Then they clustered round him, each face like a fiery mask, and yelled to make themselves heard above the noise of the wind and the flames, the clatter of failing stone, and the cries of hysterical women.

He broke free from them, stood alone near the burning shell of the veranda, and hoarsely shouted from there. "Come on, ma lads. Give me the ladder. Don't shrink or skulk. Come on. If I can stan' it—so can you. Fetch those floor-rugs."

He was almost breathless, but joy seemed to give force to his laboring lungs. He was thinking: "Mercy has been shown. I have been reserved for this. Instead of destroying that one child, I am to save these other children."

He had no doubt; he knew that he would do it. Nothing could stop the man who was doing his appointed work.

To all others the thing seemed impossible. He had taken off his jacket and put it over his head, and the women became silent when they saw him climb high on the ladder and spring blindfold through the flames. The ladder fell with half its length on fire and then smoldered like a shattered torch. Then they saw clouds of smoke pouring outward from a window; and the flames on the balcony lessened and grew dim, as if choked by the smoke. Then there came a shout, and the men with the stretched rug moved stanchly to his call.

He was out again on the balcony, with a child in his arms.

"That's one," he shouted, as he dropped her to the men below. "I b'lieve they're all alive."

So he came and went, rapid and sure, carrying his burdens. "That's two.... That's three.... That's four. They're well-nigh suffocated—but they're alive." He crawled on the floor to find them, snatched the blankets and sheets off the beds, wrapped them from head to foot. "That's five.... That's six. She has fainted—but she's alive."

On the balcony the red-hot metal had burned his feet nearly to the bone, his blistered hands were big and soft as boxing gloves, even the air in his lungs was on fire. While he crawled and groped between the beds for the last of the children, the floor began to bulge and sag, and fragments of the plaster ceiling rained upon his head and back.

"That's seven. Fainted. Wants air.... Still alive."

They all shouted to him. "Don't go back, sir. There's no more. You've got 'em all out now. Oh, sir, don't go back."

But he went, gasping for breath, and muttering, "May be another. P'raps there's another. Better see."

He had got to the middle of the room when the floor gave way under him; and almost at the same moment there was a crash and the whole roof fell in. He went down amid the sudden wreck, down to a narrow couch of wood and stone, where he lay and still could think. He was pinned with an iron beam across his chest, in darkness, with the roar of the flames just above his head; smashed, mangled, roasting; but still full of a joy and hope that obliterated pain. He whispered faintly: "O God the Father and God the Holy Ghost, accept this my expiation."

And he whispered again.

"This fire has cleansed me. O Christ, take me to Thy bosom, white and spotless as the driven snow."

That was his last thought. There came another crash, a rending pang, and peace.

THE END