s made
you what you are. Cleave to your Church, child--hold to your pure beliefs,
and keep a little love back, Lynette, from your Holy Family and your
Saints in Heaven, to give to a poor devil who needs it desperately!"

The sweet colour flushed her, and her face was more than beautiful in its
compassion. She said:

"I pray for you now, and I will always. And one day our Lord will give you
back the faith that you have lost."

"Thank you, dear!" said Saxham humbly. She was opening her lips to speak
again when he lifted his hand and stopped her.

"There is one other thing I should like to make clear. I--am not rich. But
neither am I absolutely poor. Letters that I have received from a firm of
solicitors acting for the trustees and executors of--a near relative
deceased, will prove to you that I am possessed of some small property,
bringing in an annual income of something like two hundred pounds, and
funds sufficient to settle a few thousands upon my wife by way of
marriage-jointure. Believe me," he added, in answer to her look, "I know
you to be incapable of a mercenary thought. But what I should have
explained to"--he pointed to the grave that lay so near--"to _her_, I must
make clear to you. It could not be otherwise."

She went over to the grave and knelt beside it, and laid her pure cheek
upon it, and spoke to the Dead in a low, murmuring tone. Saxham knew as he
watched her, breathing heavily, that the consent of the Mother would never
have been given to the marriage he proposed. That other obstacle in the
road of his desire, the lover who had deceived, had been swept away, with
the stern and tender guardian, in one cataclysm of Fate. He went back in
thought to the ending of his long shooting-match _a outrance_ with Father
Noah, and remembered how he had promised himself that all should go well
with Saxham provided Saxham's bullet got home first.

Were not things going better than he had hoped? She had not even recoiled
from him when he had told her of those degraded days of wastrelhood.
Surely things were going well for Saxham, he said, as he waited with his
hungering eyes upon his heart's desire. What it cost him not to step over
to her, snatch her from the ground, and crush her upon his heart with hot
and passionate kisses and wild words of worship, he knew quite well. But
in that he was able to exercise such a mastery over himself and keep that
other Saxham down, Saxham gave praise to that strange god he had