what he saw was more terrible. The face was
before him, but it was a dead face now. He saw his own corpse stretched
out on his father's grave.

His head fell on the cold sod. He lay like the dead on the grave of the
dead. Then he knew that it was ordered above that the cloud of his
father's sin should darken his days; that through all the range and
change of life he was to be the lonely slave of a sin not his own. His
fate was sin-inherited, and the wages of sin is death.

Was it strange that at that moment, when all the earth seemed gloomed by
the shadow of a curse that lay blackest over him--when reverence for a
father's memory and love learned at a mother's knee were deadened by a
sense of irremediable wrong--was it strange that there and then peace
fell on him like a dove from heaven?

Orphaned in one hour--now, and not till now--foredoomed to writhe like a
worm amid the dust of the world--the man in him arose and shook off its
fear.

It was because he came to know--rude man as he was, unlettered, but
strong of soul--that there is a Power superior to fate, that the
stormiest sea has its Master, that the waif that is cast by the roughest
wave on the loneliest shore is yet seen and known.

And the voice of an angel seemed to whisper in his heart the story of
Hagar and her son; how the boy was the first-born of his father; how the
second-born became the heir; how the woman and son were turned away; how
they were nigh to death in the desert; and how, at last, the cry came
from heaven, "God hath heard the voice of the lad where he is."

The horror of the vision had gone. It would come back no more. Paul
walked home, went up to his own room, and slept peacefully.

When he awoke the pink and yellow rose of a wintery sunrise bloomed over
the head of the Eel Crags. The tinkle of the anvil came from across the
vale. Sheep were bleating high up on the frost-nipped side of the fell.
The echo of the ax could be heard from the wood, and the muffled lowing
of the kine from the shippon in the yard behind. The harsh scrape of
Natt's clogs was on the gravel. A robin with full throat perched on the
window-ledge and warbled cheerily.

Last night was gone from him for all eternity. Before him was the day,
the world, and life.

CHAPTER XV.

That day--the day before the wedding--all the gossiping tongues in
Newlands were cackling from morning till night. Natt had been sent round
the dale with invitations addressed to s