Her own quiet eyes filled with tears.  There was a sudden silence.  Margaret shivered, as if some pain stung her.  Holding her father’s bony hand in hers, she patted it on her knee.  The hand trembled a little.  Knowles’s sharp eyes darted from one to the other; then, with a smothered growl, he shook himself, and rushed headlong into the old battle which he and the schoolmaster had been waging now, off and on, some six years.  That was a fight, I can tell you!  None of your shallow, polite clashing of modern theories,—­no talk of your Jeffersonian Democracy, your high-bred Federalism!  They took hold of the matter by the roots, clear at the beginning.

Mrs. Howth’s breath fairly left her, they went into the soul of the matter in such a dangerous way.  What if Joel should hear?  No doubt he would report that his master was an infidel,—­that would be the next thing they would hear.  He was in the kitchen now:  he finished his wood-chopping an hour ago.  Asleep, doubtless; that was one comfort.  Well, if he were awake, he could not understand.  That class of people——­And Mrs. Howth (into whose kindly brain just enough of her husband’s creed had glimmered to make her say, “that class of people,” in the tone with which Abraham would not have spoken of Dives over the gulf) went tranquilly back to her knitting, wondering why Dr. Knowles should come ten times now where he used to come once, to provoke Samuel into these wearisome arguments.  Ever since their misfortune came on them, he had been there every night, always at it.  She should think he might be a little more considerate.  Mr. Howth surely had enough to think of, what with his—­his misfortune, and the starvation waiting for them, and poor Margaret’s degradation, (she sighed here,) without bothering his head about the theocratic principle, or the Battle of Armageddon.  She had hinted as much to Dr. Knowles one day, and he had muttered out something about its being “the life of the dog, Ma’am.”  She wondered what he meant by that!  She looked over at his bearish figure, snuff-drabbled waistcoat, and shock of black hair.  Well, poor man, he could not help it, if he were coarse, and an Abolitionist, and a Fourierite, and——­She was getting a little muddy now, she was conscious, so turned her mind back to the repose of her stocking.  Margaret took it very quietly, seeing her father flaming so.  But Margaret never had any opinions to express.  She was not like the Parnells:  they were noted for their clear judgment.  Mrs. Howth was a Parnell.

“The combat deepens,—­on, ye brave!”

The Doctor’s fat, leathery face was quite red now, and his sentences were hurled out in a sarcastic bass, enough to wither the marrow of a weak man.  But the schoolmaster was no weak man.  His foot was entirely on his native heath, I assure you.  He knew every inch of the ground, from the domination of the absolute faith in the ages of Fetichism, to its pseudo-presentment in the tenth century, and its