and was to be recognised in
every act of those which had driven the people to this madness, his
will and his alone could stay the storm that was now raging in the
hills.

Once the Bishop had seen that man do an act of supreme and unselfish
bravery. It was an act of both physical and moral courage the like of
which the Bishop had never witnessed. It was an act which had
revealed in Clifford W. Stanton a depth of strong fineness that no man
would have suspected. It was done in the dim, dead time of faraway
youth, but the Bishop had not forgotten. And he knew that men do not
rise to such heights without having very deep in them the nobility to
make it possible and at times inevitable that they should rise to
those heights.

After these years and the encrusting strata of compromise and
cowardice and selfishness which years and life lay upon the fresh
heart of the youth of men, could that depth of nobility in the soul of
Clifford W. Stanton again be touched?

Almost before the forces of the State were in motion against the
people of the hills, the Bishop, early of a morning, walked into the
office of Clifford Stanton.

Stanton was a smaller man than the Bishop, and though younger than the
latter by some half-dozen years, it was evident that he had burned up
the fuel of life more rapidly. Where the Bishop looked and spoke and
moved with the deliberate fixity of the settling years, Stanton acted
with a quick nervousness that shook just a perceptible little. The
spiritual strength of restraint and inward thinking which had
chiselled the Bishop's face into a single, simple expression of will
power was not to be found in the other's face. In its stead there was
a certain steel-trap impression, as though the man behind the face
had all his life refused to be certain of anything until the jaws of
the trap had set upon the accomplished fact.

Physically the two men were much of a type. You would have known them
anywhere for New Englanders of the generation that has disappeared
almost completely in the last twenty years. They had been boys at
Harvard together, though not of the same class. They had been together
in the Civil War, though the nature of their services had been
infinitely diverse. They had met here and there casually and
incidentally in the business of life. But they faced each other now
virtually as strangers, and with a certain tightening grip upon
himself each man realised that he was about to grapple with one