ministrations, but he was the Sadducee who scoffed and made the
work heavy and uphill throughout. He gave a grudging assent to the
Bible-classes, the Wednesday evening services at the Sunday-school,
the lectures on great men on the first Monday in the month, which
Alick proposed and established. He thought it all weariness to the
flesh and a waste of time and energy; but the traditions of his order
were strong, if he himself did not share them, and he had to give way
in the end. He consoled himself with the reflection that the boy would
find out his mistake before long, and that then he would know who had
been right throughout.

But even zeal and hope and diligence in his work could not lighten the
persistent sadness which was Alick's chief characteristic now. Gaunt
and silent, with the eyes of a man whose inner self is absent and
whose thoughts are not with his company, he looked as if he had passed
through the fire, and had not passed through unscathed. No one knew
what had happened to him, and, though many made conjectures, none came
near the truth. Meanwhile, he seemed as if he lived only to work, and,
the clearer-sighted might have added, to wait.

For a further local change, Lionnet was tenanted again by a strange
and solitary man, who never went to church and did not visit in
the neighborhood. He was in consequence believed to be a forger, an
escaped convict in hiding, or, by the more charitable, a maniac as yet
not dangerous. North Aston held him in deeper horror than it had held
even Pepita, and his true personality exercised its wits more keenly
than had even the true personality of madame. In point of fact, he was
a quiet, inoffensive, amiable man, who gave his mind to Sanskrit for
work and to entomology for play, and did not trouble himself about his
own portrait as drawn in the local vernacular. Nevertheless, for all