, his reins loose on his horse's neck, his
eyes, unseeing, roving over copse and meadow across to the eternal
hills--a face, seen for an instant, smiling and gone again; a whisper
in his ear, with that dear stammer of shyness; a touch on his knee of
those rippling fingers that he had watched in the moonlight playing
gently on the sluice-gate above the moonlit stream.... He would tell
no one if God wished it to be a secret; he would keep it wholly to
himself. He did not ask now to possess her; only to be certain that
she lived, and that death was not what it seemed to be.

* * * * *

"Is Father Mahon at home?" he asked, as he halted a mile from his own
house in the village, where stood the little tin church, not a hundred
yards from its elder alienated sister, to which he and Maggie went on
Sundays.

The housekeeper turned from her vegetable-gathering beyond the
fence, and told him yes. He dismounted, hitched the reins round the
gatepost, and went in.

Ah! what an antipathetic little room this was in which he waited while
the priest was being fetched from upstairs!

Over the mantelpiece hung a large oleograph of Leo XIII, in cope and
tiara, blessing with upraised hand and that eternal, wide-lipped
smile; a couple of jars stood beneath filled with dyed grasses; a
briar pipe, redolent and foul, lay between them. The rest of the room
was in the same key: a bright Brussels carpet, pale and worn by the
door, covered the floor; cheap lace curtains were pinned across the
windows; and over the littered table a painted deal bookshelf held a
dozen volumes, devotional, moral, and dogmatic theology; and by the
side of that an illuminated address framed in gilt, and so on.

Laurie looked at it all in dumb dismay. He had seen it before, again
and again, but had never realized its horror as he realized it now
from the depths of his own misery. Was it really true that his
religion could emit such results?

There was a step on the stairs--a very heavy one--and Father Mahon
came in, a large, crimson-faced man, who seemed to fill the room with
a completely unethereal presence, and held out his hand with a certain
gravity. Laurie took it and dropped it.

"Sit down, my dear boy," said the priest, and he impelled him gently
to a horsehair-covered arm-chair.

Laurie stiffened.

"Thank you, father; but I mustn't stay."

He fumbled in his pocket, and fetched out a little paper-covered
packet.

"Wil