wading the drifts.

"She is my debtor, and I _will_ be paid."

He flattered himself that it was opportunity, not audacity, which had
failed him. He misjudged the quality of his own nature, and held it for
something lower than it was.

CHAPTER XXXIV.

CASE OF DOMESTIC PERSECUTION--REMARKABLE INSTANCE OF PIOUS PERSEVERANCE
IN THE DISCHARGE OF RELIGIOUS DUTIES.

Martin, having known the taste of excitement, wanted a second draught;
having felt the dignity of power, he loathed to relinquish it. Miss
Helstone--that girl he had always called ugly, and whose face was now
perpetually before his eyes, by day and by night, in dark and in
sunshine--had once come within his sphere. It fretted him to think the
visit might never be repeated.

Though a schoolboy he was no ordinary schoolboy; he was destined to grow
up an original. At a few years' later date he took great pains to pare
and polish himself down to the pattern of the rest of the world, but he
never succeeded; an unique stamp marked him always. He now sat idle at
his desk in the grammar school, casting about in his mind for the means
of adding another chapter to his commenced romance. He did not yet know
how many commenced life-romances are doomed never to get beyond the
first, or at most the second chapter. His Saturday half-holiday he spent
in the wood with his book of fairy legends, and that other unwritten
book of his imagination.

Martin harboured an irreligious reluctance to see the approach of
Sunday. His father and mother, while disclaiming community with the
Establishment, failed not duly, once on the sacred day, to fill their
large pew in Briarfield Church with the whole of their blooming family.
Theoretically, Mr. Yorke placed all sects and churches on a level. Mrs.
Yorke awarded the palm to Moravians and Quakers, on account of that
crown of humility by these worthies worn. Neither of them were ever
known, however, to set foot in a conventicle.

Martin, I say, disliked Sunday, because the morning service was long,
and the sermon usually little to his taste. This Saturday afternoon,
however, his woodland musings disclosed to him a new-found charm in the
coming day.

It proved a day of deep snow--so deep that Mrs. Yorke during breakfast
announced her conviction that the children, both boys and girls, would
be better at home; and her decision that, instead of going to church,
they should sit silent for two hours in the back parlour, while Rose a