ow him with her curse from her grave. For some minutes
this feeling grew more and more powerful, and more and more his limbs
and whole body quivered. The poor woman in the crape saw that he
trembled, and leaned towards him and asked if he was ill. But he only
shook his head and drew back in silence into the corner of the pew.

"I must be going mad," he thought, and to steady his mind he turned
to the book, thinking to follow the old parson as he lisped along.

It was a reference Bible that the woman had lent him, and as his eyes
rambled over the page, never resting until they alit on the words,
_then will I slay my brother Jacob_, he shuddered and thought "How
hideous!" All at once he marked the word _slay_ in the margin with
many references to it, and hardly knowing what he was doing he turned
up the first of them. From that moment his senses were in a turmoil,
and he knew nothing clearly of all that was being done about him. He
thought he saw that through all ages God had made man the instrument
of his vengeance on the wrongdoer. The stories of Moses, of Saul, of
Samson, came back to him one by one, and as he read a chill terror
filled his whole being.

He put the book down, trying to compose himself, and then he thought,
"How childish? God is King of earth and heaven, and needs the help of
no man." But his nervous fingers could not rest and he took up the
Bible again, while the parson prosed through his short sermon. This
time he turned away from the passages that haunted him, though "Esau,
Esau, Esau," rang in his head. Rolling the leaves in his hand he read
in one place how the Lord visits His vengeance upon the children for
the sins of the fathers, and then in another place how the nearest of
kin to him that is killed shall avenge the blood spilt, and then
again in yet another place how if man keeps not his covenant with the
Lord, the Lord will send a faintness upon him, and a great and woeful
trembling, so that the sound of a shaken leaf shall chase him.

"Am I then afraid?" he asked himself, and shut the book once more.
His head swam with vague thoughts. "I must keep my vow," he thought.
"I am losing my senses," he thought again. "I am an Esau," he thought
once more.

Then he looked around the church, and if he had seen Greeba at that
moment the fire of his heart would have burnt itself out, and all
thought of his vow would have gone from him as it had gone before. He
did not see her, but he remembered her,