breath of the sleeping pine-forests, moved slowly and cold, like
some human voice weary with preaching to unbelieving hearts of a
peace on earth. This man's heart was unbelieving; he chafed in
the oppressive quiet; it was unfeeling mockery to a sick and
hungry world,--a dead torpor of indifference. Years of hot and
turbid pain had dulled his eyes to the eternal secret of the
night; his soul was too sore with stumbling, stung, inflamed with
the needs and suffering of the countless lives that hemmed him
in, to accept the great prophetic calm. He was blind to the
prophecy written on the earth since the day God first bade it
tell thwarted man of the great To-Morrow.

He turned from the night in-doors. Human hearts were his proper
study. The old house, he thought, slept with the rest. One did
not wonder that the pendulum of the clock swung long and slow.
The frantic, nervous haste of town-clocks chorded better with the
pulse of human life. Yet life in the veins of these people
flowed slow and cool; their sorrows and joys were few and
life-long. The enduring air suited this woman, Margret Howth.
Her blood could never ebb or flow with sudden gusts of passion,
like his own, throbbing, heating continually: one current,
absorbing, deep, would carry its tide from one eternity to the
other, one love or one hate. Whatever power was in the tide
should be his, in its entirety. It was his right. Was not his
aim high, the highest? It was his right.

Margret, looking up, saw the man's eye fixed on her. She met it
coolly. All her short life, this strange man, so tender to the
weak, had watched her with a sort of savage scorn, sneering at
her childish, dreamy apathy, driving her from effort to effort