ing the old man at his work.

The newness and the freshness of spring were in the air, snow that had
fallen three days ago was nearly gone, just a trace of it lay on the black
earth of the flower beds; white crocuses, blue crocuses, snow-drops, those
first trumpeters of spring, blew valiantly in the little garden, the air
was sharp and clear, and the sky above blue and sparkling. Great masses of
white cloud filled the horizon, sun-stricken, fair, and snow-bright, solid
as mountains, and like far-off mountains filled with the fascination and
the call of distance.

"Spring is here," cried the birds from the new-budding trees.

The blackbird in Dr. Pons's garden to the left, answered a rapturous
thrush in the trees across the way, children's voices came from the Paris
road and the sounds of wheels and hoofs.

A sparrow with a long straw in its beak flew right across Maxine's garden,
a little winged poem, a couplet enclosing the whole story of spring.

Maxine smiled as it vanished, then she turned; the garden gate had clicked
its latch, and a big man was coming up the path.

There was only Father Champardy to see; and as his back was turned, he saw
nothing and as he was deaf, he heard nothing. The old man, bent and warped
by the years, deaf, and blind to the little love-scene behind him, was,
without knowing it, also a poem of spring; but not so joyous as the poem
of the sparrow.

"And now tell me all," said Maxine, as they sat in the chintz-hung sitting
room before a bright fire of logs. They had finished their private
affairs. The day was two hours older, and a sunbeam that had pointed at
them through the diamond-paned window had travelled away and vanished. The
day was darker outside, and it was as though spring had lost her sportive
mood and then withdrawn, not wishing to hear the tale that Adams had to
tell.

In Adams's hand Papeete's skull had been a talisman of terrible and
magical power, for with it he had touched men, and the men touched had
disclosed their worth and their worthlessness. It had been a lamp which
showed him society as it is.

The life and death of Berselius had been an object lesson for him,
teaching vividly the fact that evil is indestructible; that wash yourself
with holy water or wash yourself with soap, you will never wash away the
evil being that you have constructed by long years of evil-doing and
evil-thinking.

His pilgrimage in search of mercy and redress for a miserable people h