away, even before a guess began that he had not brought away
his full wits.

Out in the porch he would come to bask in the sun for hours with animal
content. Out to the gate he would come, going weakly to and fro as he was
bid. But Giles was surly to men, and to women Lois was iron cold, and
Rhoda had deft ways of insult to repulse unwelcome intrusion; and so for
a little while those three guarded him and kept close the secret of his
ruin.

Then one at an unguarded moment won in, and spied, and carried her report
of his mild, his brute-mild gaze, and his slow labour of speech: it was
the mother of Philip. Rhoda found a token of her left beside Christian, a
well-intended, small peace-offering, in a cheese of her sole make.

'Who brought this?' she asked; and he told.

'She offered it--to you?'

'To us,' he returned quietly.

'And you took it--thanked her and took it?'

He looked up and studied her face for enlightenment.

'The mother was not here.'

Rhoda's passion surged over. 'How dared she, how dared she!' she stormed,
and seized on the poor gift, cast it down, stamped it into the sandy
path, and spurned it over the sweet herbs into the sluggy kail beyond.

Like a child, chidden for some uncomprehended fault, he looked at her,
distressed at her condemnation, anxious to atone, wondering if his senses
told him true. Her anger failing under an agony of pity and remorse, from
the unendurable pain of his look she fled to hide her passionate weeping.
When Lois came out to Christian he was deeply asleep.

Soon he carried into the street his brute-mild gaze, and his slow labour
of speech. And no thumb turned against him. For all who chose to peer in
on his blank mind found how shame and rancour could take no root in a
void of memory. He met every face with an even countenance, showing no
recall of a debt to any.

In a very literal sense it was now said that the devil had gone out of
him. Willing belief held that he had been actually possessed, and
delivered only when a right instinct of severity had spoiled him for
habitation. Some compunction showed over the mooted point whether the
pitiful lasting flaw had not rather come of the last spite of an evicted
devil, than of the drastic measures of exasperated men.

In nowise did Christian's reason now work amiss, though it was slow and
heavy; nor had his memory lost all its store, nor quite its power to
store. Of earlier days his remembrance was clear and complete