yet," remarked the American, gloomily. "Asbestos
mines are piling in dollars, I can tell you. It's a shame, to my mind,
that a snapping crab-stick like that old Bates should have it all." He
rose as with the irritation of the idea, but appeared arrested as he
looked down at the dead man. "And when I think how them poor ladies got
their white skirts draggled, I do declare I feel cut up to that extent I
wouldn't care for an asbestos mine if somebody came and offered it to me
for nothing this minute."

Then, too absorbed in feeling to notice the bathos of his speech, he put
his hands in his pockets, and began strolling up and down a beat of his
own, a few yards from the track Trenholme had made, and on the other
side of the dead.

As they walked at different paces, and passing each other at irregular
times, perhaps the mind of each recurred to the remembrance of the other
ghostly incident and the rumour that the old man had already risen once.
The open spot of sloping ground surrounded by high black trees, which
had been so lately trodden by many feet, seemed now the most desolate of
desolate places. The hymn, the prayer, that had arisen there seemed to
leave in the air only that lingering influence which past excitement
lends to its acute reaction.

A sudden sharp crack and rustling, coming from out the gloom of the
trees, startled them.

"Ho!" shouted the American. "Stand! Is there any one there?"

And Alec in his heart called him a fool for his pains, and yet he
himself had not been less startled. Nothing more was heard. It was only
that time--time, that mysterious medium through which circumstance comes
to us from the source of being; that river which, unseen, unfelt,
unheard, flows onward everywhere--had just then brought the moment for
some dead branch to fall.

END OF BOOK II.

BOOK III.

"_Nothing is inexorable but Love_."

CHAPTER I.

That which is to be seen of any event, its causes and consequences, is
never important compared with the supreme importance of those unseen
workings of things physical and things spiritual which are the heart of
our life. The iceberg of the northern seas is less than its unseen
foundations; the lava stream is less than the molten sea whence it
issues; the apple falling to the ground, and the moon circling in her
orbit, are less than the great invisible force which controls their
movements and the movements of all the things that do appear. The crime
is