adually lightens. How thankful I am I came.'

She had turned and they were steadily ascending as if pushing their way,
battling on through some obstacle of the mind rather than of the senses
beneath the star-powdered callous vault of night. And it seemed to
Lawford as if, as they pressed on together, some obscure detestable
presence as slowly, as doggedly had drawn worsted aside. He could
see again the peaceful outspread branches of the trees, the lych-gate
standing in clear-cut silhouette against the liquid dusk of the sky.
A strange calm stole over his mind. The very meaning and memory of his
fear faded out and vanished, as the passed-away clouds of a storm that
leave a purer, serener sky.

They stopped and stood together on the brow of the little hill, and
Lawford, still trembling from head to foot, looked back across the
hushed and lightless countryside. 'It's all gone now,' he said
wearily, 'and now there's nothing left. You see, I cannot even ask your
forgiveness--and a stranger!'

'Please don't say that--unless--unless--a "pilgrim" too. I think,
surely, you must own we did have the best of it that time. Yes--and I
don't care WHO may be listening--but we DID win through.'

'What can I say? How shall I explain? How shall I make you understand?'

The clear grey eyes showed not the faintest perturbation. 'But I do; I
do indeed, in part; I do understand, ever so faintly.'

'And now I will come back with you.'

They paused in the darkness face to face, the silence of the sky,
arched in its vastness above the little hill, the only witness of their
triumph.

She turned unquestioningly. And laughing softly almost as children
do, the stalking shadows of a twilight wood behind them--they trod in
silence back to the house. They said good-bye at the gate, and Lawford
started once more for home. He walked slowly, conscious of an almost
intolerable weariness, as if his strength had suddenly been wrested away
from him. And at some distance beyond the top of the hill he sat down on
the bank beside a nettled ditch, and with his book pressed down upon
the wayside grass struck a match, and holding it low in the scented,
windless air turned slowly the cockled leaf.

Few of them were alike except for the dinginess of the print and the
sinister smudge of the portraits. All were sewn roughly together into
a mould-stained, marbled cover. He lit a second match, and as he did so
glanced as if inquiringly over his shoulder. And a