on was only half
accomplished. In the process known as religious conversion there are
usually three well-marked stages: first of all comes conviction of sin,
then repentance, and finally a sense of forgiveness and peace. Learoyd
attained the first stage in the process that stormy night in the little
Methodist chapel. In a dull, blurred way he arrived too at a state of
repentance for the evil he had done. But the final stage of pardon and
peace remained strange to him, and the chief spiritual effect of his
conversion upon him was the attainment of an exquisite agony of soul.
His conscience, long dormant, was roused to feverish activity. His sins,
which were many, haunted him like demons, and chief among these he
accounted, not without reason, the wrong he had done to Mary Whittaker.
She came to him in his dreams, and always under the same form. What he
saw was a girl, with downcast eyes and supplicating hands, standing at
the foot of the Holmton market-cross, with a halter round her neck. Nor
was it only in his dreams that he saw her. Sometimes as he led home his
horses at nightfall after a day's ploughmg, the same form, patient and
unreproachful, would be seen standing at the open door of the farm
waiting to receive him. With a cowed look on his face he would turn away
from the house and pass the night in the hayloft.

The effect of all this upon his constitution was what might have been
expected. One evening, after a night and day of acutest torment, he fell
in an epileptic fit upon the kitchen floor, and was found there next
morning by a child from the village who had come to the farm for milk. A
doctor was summoned, who brought with him a nurse, and for some days
Learoyd's life hung in the balance. Recovery came at last but the doctor
insisted that he must no longer live alone, but must secure the services
of an experienced house-keeper. In vain did Learoyd protest against this
plan. The medical man remained firm. The nurse would have to leave in a
few days and someone else must take her place. The farmer would not stir
a finger to find such a person, so that the responsibility rested with
the doctor. But all his inquiries availed little. There was no lack of
women suitable for the post, but not one of them would undertake it. The
memory of the scene in the market-place held them back.

Then it was that the call came to Mary Whittaker. She must go back to
the man that had wronged her. At first the thought struck terr