hey had dared believe him off his guard.

He walked moodily on in the moonlight, disdaining to either listen or
glance behind him. There was a stoop to his shoulders now, a loose
carriage which sometimes marks a man whose last shred of self-respect
has gone, leaving him nothing but the naked virtues and vices with which
he was born. McCloud's vices were many, though some of them lay dormant;
his virtues, if they were virtues, could be counted in a breath--a
natural courage, and a generous heart, paralyzed and inactive under a
load of despair and a deep resentment against everybody and everything.
He hated the fortunate and the unfortunate alike; he despised his
neighbors, he despised himself. His inertia had given place to a fierce
restlessness; he felt a sudden and curious desire for a physical
struggle with a strong antagonist--like young Byram.

All at once the misery of his poverty arose up before him. It was not
unendurable simply because he was obliged to endure it.

The thought of his hopeless poverty stupefied him at first, then rage
followed. Poverty was an antagonist--like young Byram--a powerful one.
How he hated it! How he hated Byram! Why? And, as he walked there,
shuffling up the dust in the moonlight, he thought, for the first time
in his life, that if poverty were only a breathing creature he would
strangle it with his naked hands. But logic carried him no further; he
began to brood again, remembering Tansey's insults and the white anger
of young Byram, and the threats from the dim group around the stove. If
they molested him they would remember it. He would neither pay taxes nor
work for them.

Then he thought of the path-master, reddening as he remembered Tansey's
accusation. He shrugged his shoulders and straightened up, dismissing
her from his mind, but she returned, only to be again dismissed with an
effort.

When for the third time the memory of the little path-master returned,
he glanced up as though he could see her in the flesh standing in the
road before his house. She _was_ there--in the flesh.

The moonlight silvered her hair, and her face was the face of a spirit;
it quickened the sluggish blood in his veins to see her so in the
moonlight.

She said: "I thought that if you knew I should be obliged to pay your
road-tax if you do not, you would pay. Would you?"

A shadow glided across the moonlight; it was the collie dog, and it came
and looked up into McCloud's shadowy eyes.

"Yes-