the Everlasting Gospel, and doesn't that
say we were all born wrong and need to be born again? You said only last
Sunday that if we're once on the Rock, God forgets all about the pit and
the miry clay. And you said God makes the past new--all new, and that
all the redeemed ones are just the same in His sight--all good, and with
the past away behind them. I thought it was beautiful, because I thought
about Angus--and it seemed just like the Saviour's way."

My heart was wrung with a great desire to take the bended form unto
myself. I half moved forward to kiss the lips of this kneeling priestess
unto love. But as I did so the memory of other lips that had been
pressed to them rolled in upon me and swept away the better impulse. I
faltered into compromise.

"Margaret, you are still my daughter and I am touched by what you say.
Let us find common ground. Promise me that you will suspend judgment in
this matter for a year, your promise meantime to be revoked and at the
end of that time, we will take it up afresh. This will give time for
sober judgment."

But her blanched face turned to mine, and the white lips spoke again.
"Oh, spare me, father, for I cannot--you know I cannot--oh, father, pity
me!"

My soul flamed with ungovernable anger. I did pity her and this it was
that stirred my cruelty. For my soul relapsed to barbarous coarseness
and I said: "Then choose between us--you can have your ----," and I
called him an awful word, the foulest of all words, whose very sound
speaks the shame it means to tell, the curse of humanity hissed in its
nauseous syllables.

And more--but how can I write it down! I did not strike her--but I
thrust her from me; I laid my coward hand upon her shoulder--not in
violence nor heavily, but eternal menace was in it. For I pushed her
from me, crying brutally: "Quote me another Scripture. Have you not
chosen the better part? There is the door which his shadow first
accursed--you see the door?" and I hurled the poisoned word at her
again.

She looked at me but once--as one, suddenly awakening, looks at her
assassin. Then she went out, a lover as white as snow.

XXI

_The OLD PRECENTOR'S NEW SONG_

As a stream emerges from its forest tunnel, eluding the embrace of
tangled shadows, swiftly gliding from sombre swamps and hurrying towards
the sunlit plain, its phantom weeds of widowhood exchanged for its
bridal robe of light; so doth this tale of mine glide forth from the
sable