f all he loved this
very beginning of day, before darkness was quite gone, when the world
seemed to be awakening mid sleepy whisperings and sounds came clearly
from a long distance.

This morning he heard the barking of a dog, a mile away it must have
been, and Peter, who followed close beside him, pricked up his ears at
the sound of it. Father John had noted Peter's vigilance, the cautious
expectancy with which he was always sniffing the air, and the keen
alertness of his eyes and ears. McKay had explained the reason for
it. And this morning, as they made their way down to the pool at
the creekside, Peter's ceaseless watching for danger held a deeper
significance for Father John. All through the night, in spite of his
faith and his words of consolation, he was thinking of the menace which
was following McKay, and which eventually must catch up with him.

And yet, how short a time was five years! Looking backward, each five
years of his life seemed but a yesterday. It was eight times five years
ago that a sweet-faced girl had first filled his life, as Nada filled
Jolly Roger's now, and through the thirty years since he had lost her he
could still hear her voice as clearly as though he had held her in his
arms only a few hours ago, so swift had been the passing of time. But
looking ahead, and not backward, five years seemed an eternity of time,
and the dread of it was in Father John's heart as he stood at the side
of the pool, with the first pink glow of sunrise coming to him over the
forest-tops.

Five years, and he was an old man now. A long and dreary wait it would
be for him. But for youth, the glorious youth of Roger and Nada, it
would seem very short when in later years they looked back upon it. And
for a time as he contemplated the long span of life that lay behind
him, and the briefness of that which lay ahead, a yearning selfishness
possessed the soul of Father John, an almost savage desire to hold those
five years away from the violation of the law--not alone for Nada's sake
and Roger McKay's--but for his own. In this twilight of a tragic life a
great happiness had come to him in the love of these two, and thought of
its menace, its desecration by a pitiless and mistaken justice, roused
in him something that was more like the soul of a fighting man than the
spirit of a missioner of God.

Vainly he tried to stamp out the evil of this resentment, for evil he
believed it to be. And shame possessed him when he