It was Margaret who discovered Clement’s hiding-place and sought him out, and begged him to leave the dismal hole he inhabited, and come to the vacant vicarage.

“My beloved,” said he, with a strange mixture of tenderness and dogged resolution, “I bless thee for giving me one more sight of thy sweet face, and may God forgive thee, and bless thee, for destroying in a minute the holy place it hath taken six months of solitude to build.  I am a priest, a monk, and though my heart break I must be firm.  My poor Margaret, I seem cruel; yet I am kind; ’tis best we part; ay, this moment.”

But Margaret went away, and, determined to drive Clement from his hermitage, returned again with their child, which she left in the cell in its owner’s absence.  Now, Clement was fond of children, and, thinking the infant had been deserted by some unfortunate mother, he at once set to work to comfort it.

“Now bless thee, bless thee sweet innocent!  I would not change thee for e’en a cherub in heaven,” said Clement.  Soon the child was nestling in the hermit’s arms.

“I ikes oo,” said the little boy.  “Ot is oo?  Is oo a man?”

“Ay, little heart, and a great sinner to boot”

“I ikes great tingers.  Ting one a tory.”

Clement chanted a child’s story in a sort of recitative.  The boy listened with rapture, and presently succumbed to sleep.

Clement began to rock his new treasure in his arms, and to crone over him a little lullaby well known in Tergon, with which his own mother had often set him off.

He sighed deeply, and could not help thinking what might have been but for a piece of paper with a lie in it.

The next moment the moonlight burst into his cell, and with it, and in it, Margaret Brandt was down at his knee with a timorous hand upon his shoulder.

“Gerald, you do not reject us.  You cannot.”

The hermit stared from the child to her in throbbing amazement.

“Us?” he gasped at last.

Margaret was surprised in her turn.

“What!” she cried.  “Doth not a father know his own child?  Fie, Gerard, to pretend!  ’Tis thine own flesh and blood thou holdest to thine heart.”

Long they sat and talked that night, and the end of it was Clement promised to leave his cave for the manse at Gouda.  But once the new vicar was installed Margaret kept away from the parsonage.  She left little Gerard there to complete the conquest her maternal heart ascribed to him, and contented herself with stolen meetings with her child.

Then the new vicar of Gouda, his beard close shaved, and in a grey frock and large felt hat, came to bring her to the vicarage.

“My sweet Margaret!” he cried.  “Why is this?  Why hold you aloof from your own good deed?  We have been waiting and waiting for you every day, and no Margaret.”

And Margaret went to the manse, and found Catherine, Clement’s mother, there; and next day being Sunday the two women heard the Vicar of Gouda preach in his own church.  It was crammed with persons, who came curious, but remained.  Never was Clement’s gift as a preacher displayed more powerfully.  In a single sermon, which lasted two hours, and seemed to last but twenty minutes, he declared the whole scripture.