some human voice weary with
preaching to unbelieving hearts of a peace on earth. This man's heart
was unbelieving; he chafed in the oppressive quiet; it was unfeeling
mockery to a sick and hungry world,--a dead torpor of indifference.
Years of hot and turbid pain had dulled his eyes to the eternal secret
of the night; his soul was too sore with stumbling, stung, inflamed with
the needs and suffering of the countless lives that hemmed him in, to
accept the great prophetic calm. He was blind to the prophecy written on
the earth since the day God first bade it tell thwarted man of the great
To-Morrow.

He turned from the night in-doors. Human hearts were his proper study.
The old house, he thought, slept with the rest. One did not wonder that
the pendulum of the clock swung long and slow. The frantic, nervous
haste of town-clocks chorded better with the pulse of human life. Yet
life in the veins of these people flowed slow and cool; their sorrows
and joys were few and life-long. The slow, enduring air suited this
woman, Margaret Howth. Her blood could never ebb or flow with sudden
gusts of passion, like his own, throbbing, heating continually: one
current, absorbing, deep, would carry its tide from one eternity to the
other, one love or one hate. Whatever power was in the tide should
be his, in its entirety. It was his right. Was not his aim high, the
highest? It was his right.

Margaret, looking up, saw the man's intolerant eye fixed on her. She met
it coolly. All her short life, this strange man, so tender to the weak,
had watched her with a sort of savage scorn, sneering at her apathy, her
childish, dreamy quiet, driving her from effort to effort with a scourge
of impatient contempt. What did he want now with her? Her duty was
light; she took it up,--she was glad to take it up; what more would he
have? She put the whole matter away from her.

It grew late. She sat down by the lamp and began to read to her father,
as usual. Her mother put away her knitting; Joel came in half-asleep;
the Doctor put out his everlasting cigar, and listened, as he did
everything else, intently. It was an old story that she read,--the story
of a man who walked the fields and crowded streets of Galilee eighteen
hundred years ago. Knowles, with his heated brain, fancied that the
silence without in the night grew deeper, that the slow-moving air
stopped in its course to listen. Perhaps the simple story carried a
deeper meaning to these broodi