out o' t' chapil an' away home. An' ivver sin that time Sam's coom
reg'lar to chapil twice on Sundays an' to t' weeknight sarvice too."

"But will it last?" asked Tom Parfitt, whose long experience as a chapel
member had taught him the snares of backsliding.

"Aye, 'twill last," replied the circuit steward. "Sam's a changed man:
he has gien ower sweerin', goes no more to t' public, but bides at home
o' neight an' sits cowerin' ower t' fire readin' t' Book."

The account which the circuit steward gave of the farmer's conversion
was substantially correct, but it did not furnish the whole truth. The
character of his life had changed, but his conversion was only half
accomplished. In the process known as religious conversion there are
usually three well-marked stages: first of all comes conviction of sin,
then repentance, and finally a sense of forgiveness and peace. Learoyd
attained the first stage in the process that stormy night in the little
Methodist chapel. In a dull, blurred way he arrived too at a state of
repentance for the evil he had done. But the final stage of pardon and
peace remained strange to him, and the chief spiritual effect of his
conversion upon him was the attainment of an exquisite agony of soul.
His conscience, long dormant, was roused to feverish activity. His sins,
which were many, haunted him like demons, and chief among these he
accounted, not without reason, the wrong he had done to Mary Whittaker.
She came to him in his dreams, and always under the same form. What he
saw was a girl, with downcast eyes and supplicating hands, standing at
the foot of the Holmton market-cross, with a halter round her neck. Nor
was it only in his dreams that he saw her. Sometimes as he led home his
horses at nightfall after a day's ploughmg, the same form, patient and
unreproachful, would be seen standing at the open door of the farm