grinning sardonically, opposing his small bulk in the very centre
of the door.

Mrs. Moore had turned down the hill, abashed and hurt at the reception
of her offer; and her husband, proud to a fault, had forbidden her
to repeat it. Nevertheless her motherly heart went out in a great
tenderness for the little orphan David. She knew well the desolateness
of his life; his father's aversion from him, and its inevitable
consequences.

It became an institution for the boy to call every morning at Kenmuir,
and trot off to the village school with Maggie Moore. And soon the lad
came to look on Kenmuir as his true home, and James and Elizabeth Moore
as his real parents. His greatest happiness was to be away from the
Grange. And the ferret-eyed little man there noted the fact, bitterly
resented it, and vented his ill-humor accordingly.

It was this, as he deemed it, uncalled-for trespassing on his authority
which was the chief cause of his animosity against James Moore. The
Master of Kenmuir it was at whom he was aiming when he remarked one
day at the Arms: "Masel', I aye prefaire the good man who does no go to
church, to the bad man who does. But then, as ye say, Mr. Burton, I'm
peculiar."

The little man's treatment of David, exaggerated as it was by eager
credulity, became at length such a scandal to the Dale that Parson Leggy
determined to bring him to task on the matter.

Now M'Adam was the parson's pet antipathy. The bluff old minister, with
his brusque manner and big heart, would have no truck with the man who
never went to church, was perpetually in liquor, and never spoke good of
his neighbors. Yet he entered upon the interview fully resolved not to
be betrayed into an unworthy expression of feeling; rather to appeal to
the little man's better nature.

The conversation had not been in progress two minutes, however, before
he knew that, where he had meant to be calmly persuasive, he was fast
become hotly abusive.

"You, Mr. Hornbut, wi' James Moore to help ye, look after the lad's
soul, I'll see to his body," the little man was saying.

The parson's thick gray eyebrows lowered threateningly over his eyes.

"You ought to be ashamed of yourself to talk like that. Which d'you
think the more important, soul or body? Oughtn't you, his father, to be
the very first to care for the boy's soul? If not, who should? Answer
me, sir."

The little man stood smirking and sucking his eternal twig, entirely
unmoved by the oth