rime. He had been made to buy Bates' business so
that he might dwell right up against Hadleigh Wood, see it every day
from his windows, hear it whispering to him every night when he was
not asleep and dreaming of it. But for that apparently lucky chance of
Mr. Bates' retirement, he would have gone to some splendid new
country, and severing ties of locality, would have shattered
associations of ideas, and been _able to forget_. He had made up his
mind to go to one of the Australian colonies and make a fresh start
there. But that didn't match with God's intentions by any manner of
means.

His thoughts returned to Norah, and here again--here more plainly
than anywhere else--he saw the work of God. It was wonderful and
awe-inspiring how God had selected the instrument that should destroy
him. He felt that he could have resisted the charms of any other girl
in the world except this one. In mysterious ways Norah's fascination
was potent over him, while it might have been quite feeble in its
effects with regard to other men. But for Dale she represented the
solid embodiment of imagined seductiveness, allurement, supreme
feminine charm; that flicker of wild blood in her was to him an
essential attraction, and it linked itself inexplicably with the
amorous reveries of far-off days when, young and free and wild
himself, he loved the woodland glades instead of hating them.

The selected instrument--Yes, she was the one girl on earth who could
have been safely employed to achieve God's double purpose of
overwhelming him with base passion and bringing his lesson home to him
simultaneously. No other girl that ever was born could have aroused
such desire in him, and yet have slipped unscathed out of his arms at
the very moment when the consummation of his sin seemed unavoidable.
Any other girl must herself have been sacrificed in destroying him;
only the child who had frightened him in the wood could
instantaneously, by a few unconsidered words, have taken all the fire
out of him and changed his heart to a lump of ice. That was a stroke
of the Master: most Godlike in its care for the innocent and its
confusion of the guilty.

He remembered how grievously he had dreaded this child--the little
black-haired elf that had seen him hiding. It had made him shiver to
think of her--the small woodland demon, the devil's spy whose lisping
treble might be distinct and loud enough to utter his death sentence.
A thousand times he had wondered a