tly, how can I come, how can I find!
A wordless, baffled, impotent cry, that reached nowhere.

The Bishop had once said it. We get no answer.

Then the sense of his guilt, unending, ineradicable guilt, swept down
upon him again and beat him and flattened him and buffeted him. It
left him shaken and beaten. He was not able to face this thing. It was
too big for him. He was after all only a boy, a lost boy, travelling
alone in the dark, under the unconcerned stars. He had been caught and
crushed between forces and passions that were too much for him. He was
little and these things were very great.

Unconsciously the heart within him, the child heart that somehow lives
ever in every man, began to speak, to speak, without knowing it,
direct to God.

It was not a prayer. It was not a plea. It was not an excuse. It was
the simple unfolding of the heart of a child to the Father who made
it. The heart was bruised. A weight was crushing it. It could not lift
itself. That was all; the cry of helplessness complete, of dependence
utter and unreasoning.

Suddenly the man raised his head and looked at the stars, blinking at
him through the starting tears.

Was that God? Had some one spoken? Where was the load that had lain
upon him all these weary hours?

He stopped his horse and looked about him, breathing in great, free,
hungry breaths of God's air about him. For it _was_ God's air. That
was the wonder of it. The world was God's! And it was new made for him
to live in!

He breathed his thanks, a breath and a prayer of thanks, as simple and
unreasoning, unquestioning, as had been the unfolding of his heart. He
had been bound: he was free!

Then his horse went flying up the hill road, beating a tattoo of new
life upon the soft, breathing air of the spring night.

With the inconsequence of all of us children when God has lifted the
stone from our hearts, Jeffrey had already left everything of the last
thirty-six hours behind him as completely as if he had never lived
through those hours. (That He lets us forget so easily, shows that He
is the Royal God in very deed.)

Before the sun was well up in the morning Jeffrey was on his way to
French Village, to look out the cabin where Ruth had cared for old
Robbideau Laclair, and had shamed the lazy men into fixing that roof.

What he had heard the other day from Cynthe was by no means all that
he had heard of the doings of Ruth during the last seven months. For
the French pe