xed. The larger debts were paid: for some
months she had not opened the door to a dunning tradesman.
The floods, as by a miracle, had spared her crops and she had a
scheme for getting her surplus vegetables conveyed to Epworth market.
Already she had opened up a trade in fowls with a travelling dealer.
"Molly," wrote her father, "miraculously gets money even in Wroote,
and has given the first fruit of her earning to her mother, lending
her money, and presenting her with a new cloak of her own buying and
making, for which God will bless her."

Her secret dissent did not escape the Rector's eye, so alert for
every sign of defiance: but in his expanding sense of success he let
it pass. There was another, however, who divined it and watched it
anxiously day after dreary day, for it answered a trouble in his own
breast.

Johnny Whitelamb was now almost a man grown: but what really
separated him from the Johnny Whitelamb of two years ago was no
increase in stature or in knowledge. That which grew within him, and
still grew, defying all efforts to kill it, was--a doubt. It had
been born in him--no bigger then than a grain of mustard-seed--on the
day when he sought Hetty to send her to the house where William
Wright waited for her answer. Until then the Rector had been to him
a divine man, in wisdom and goodness very little lower than the
angels. And now--

He fought it hard, at first in terror, at length in cold desperation.
But still the doubt grew. And the worst was that Molly guessed his
secret. He feared to meet her eye. It seemed to him that he and she
were bound in some monstrous conspiracy. He spent hours in wrestling
with it. At times he would rise from table on some stammered excuse,
rush off to the fields and there, in a hidden corner, fall on his
knees and pray, or even lie at full length, his face hidden in the
grasses, his body writhing, his ungainly legs twisting and
untwisting. And still the doubt grew.

Everything confirmed it. He saw the suffering by which mother and
daughters were yoked. He noted the insufficient food, the thin
clothing, the wan cheeks, the languid tread. He no longer took these
for granted, but looked into their causes. And the Rector's
blindness to them, or indifference, became a terror to him--a thing
inhuman.

He began to think him mad. Worse, he began to hate him: he, Johnny
Whitelamb, who had taken everything at his hands--food, clothing,
knowledge, even his fai