hour of ravage and rage, and then,
spent and bodiless, the storm crept down the other side of the mountain
and into the next parish, whither the affrighted quack-doctor had
betaken himself. After, a perfect calm, a shining sun, and a sweet smell
over all the land, which had thirstily drunk the battering showers.

In the house on Vadrome Mountain the tailor of Chaudiere had watched the
storm with sympathetic interest. It was in accord with his own feelings.
He had had a hard fight for months past, and had gone down in the storm
of his emotions one night when a song called Champagne Charlie had had a
weird and thrilling antiphonal. There had been a subsequent debacle for
himself, and then a revelation concerning Jo Portugais. Ensued hours
and days, wherein he had fought a desperate fight with the present--with
himself and the reaction from his dangerous debauch.

The battle for his life had been fought for him by this gloomy woodsman
who henceforth represented his past, was bound to him by a measureless
gratitude, almost a sacrament--of the damned. Of himself he had played
no conscious part in it till the worst was over. On the one side was the
Cure, patient, gentle, friendly, never pushing forward the Faith which
the good man dreamed should give him refuge and peace; on the other
side was the murderer, who typified unrest, secretiveness, an awful
isolation, and a remorse which had never been put into words or acts of
restitution. For six days the tailor-shop and the life at Chaudiere had
been things almost apart from his consciousness. Ever-recurring
memories of Rosalie Evanturel were driven from his mind with a painful
persistence. In the shadows where his nature dwelt now he would not
allow her good innocence and truth to enter. His self-reproach was the
more poignant because it was silent.

Watching the tempest-swept valley, the tortured forest, where wild life
was in panic, there came upon him the old impulse to put his thoughts
into words, "and so be rid of them," as he was wont to say in other
days. Taking from his pocket some slips of paper, he laid them on the
table before him. Three or four times he leaned over the paper to write,
but the noise of the storm again and again drew his look to the window.
The tempest ceased almost as suddenly as it had come, and, as the first
sunlight broke through the flying clouds, he mechanically lifted a sheet
of the paper and held it up to the light. It brought to his eyes the