utumn landscape to the softly luminous band on the far horizon.
Somewhere in a darkened corner of his brain there was the resolve that
he would not return until, like the freckled faced, barefooted boy, he
had "had his day."

At nine o'clock that night he entered an inn in the town of Briarwood,
twenty miles north of Applegate, and sitting down at one of the tables,
ordered something to eat. His limbs ached, not from the walk in the
wind, but from the passion that had whipped his body like a destroying
fire. He felt still the burning throb of the sore that it had left.
Apart from this dull agony he could feel nothing--he could desire
nothing--he could remember nothing. Everything was over except the
instinct that told him that he was empty and must be fed.

While he sat there, with his aching forehead bowed in his hands, there
came a light touch on his shoulder, and looking up he saw the Reverend
Orlando Mullen, standing at his side like an embodiment of all the
things from which he had fled. For an instant he could only stare
blindly back at him. Then something which had opened in his soul, closed
softly, as if it were a shell of custom, and he knew that he was again
a prisoner. With the sight of that conventional figure, the scattered
instincts of habit and of respectability--of all the qualities for which
the race stood and against which the individual had rebelled--all these
rallied anew to the battlefield from which they had been routed by his
insurgent emotions.

"I suppose you're waiting, like myself, for the nine-forty-five train?"

"Yes, I'm waiting for the train."

"Business brought you so far away?"

"Yes, business brought me." Lifting his glass of beer, he drained it
slowly under Mr. Mullen's friendly and curious eyes.

"It looks as if we should have a perfect day for the wedding," remarked
the rector, after a pause. "Like you, I was called off on an urgent
matter, but fortunately, it only means losing a little sleep."

Then the whistle of the train blew, and ten minutes later, Abel followed
the young clergyman into the single coach and sat down in a vacant seat
at his side.

It was two o'clock when at last he drove into the back gate at the mill,
and unhitching his mare, turned her out into the pasture. As he crossed
the road to the house, he lifted his eyes mechanically to the sky, and
saw that the stars shone soft and near as if they were watching over a
night of love.

CHAPTER V

THE