men do not
despise a thief, if he steal to satisfy his soul when he is hungry._'"

"Well?" said O'Hagan, trying to hold a countenance of little concern.

"Well?" said the stranger, "for why did you steal?"

O'Hagan coughed and held down his head.

"A man without scruple and without heart," the stranger remarked to
himself.

O'Hagan looked up with a start. "Look here," he began. "You've no right
to----"

Then of a sudden the mist began to rise from the clump of bushes and the
stranger vanished. O'Hagan was back in the flesh. He stood there dazed
for the moment, with the little cross clutched in his hand. He sat down
again and _tried_ to force his spirit back to the other scene, but in
vain. He felt that he had been thrilled through and through. The
oppression, however, unlike the stern-faced monk, did not vanish, it
deepened. A throbbing headache came on, which refused to be shaken off,
and eventually sent O'Hagan to the "Bell Inn" to drink still deeper of
the waters of oblivion.

The day was already falling when he walked, jingling his silver, into
the sanded bar of the "Bell Inn," and an hour or so later, when it began
to fill with drovers and country folk, O'Hagan had looked much on the
good brown ale. He was in fact becoming very noisy. Seated in a corner,
he sang "Nell and Roger at the Wake" in a hoarse voice. The country folk
grinned and looked at him curiously.

"Shut your gab, old sport," said a rough-looking drover at last, "that
song is not fit for decent folk to hear."

O'Hagan swore like any trooper, and reached his hand out to a large
spirit bottle at his elbow, and for a moment the drover thought he would
get it thrown at his head. However, O'Hagan rose to his feet, made a bow
to the company, and made an apology to the drover. He stood there, a
blackguard on the face of him, but a gentleman in spite of that
undefinable and vaguely repulsive smirk which played about his straight
and refined mouth. He slunk away into the night.

As O'Hagan walked the night deepened in throbs of gathering darkness.
The sense of uneasiness that had been with him ever since the priest in
the cassock had appeared to him was not to be easily thrown off. He set
himself to argue down the uneasiness for which there was no more
foundation than a bad attack of "nerves" after the gloomy life in
prison. He told himself, till he believed it, that a man--just a human
man--had been crossing the fields, and that being smitten wit