a death-grip it had on his life!  He did not look back once at the motionless, dusty figure on the road.  What was that Polston had said about starving to death for a kind word? Love? He was sick of the sickly talk,—­crushed it out of his heart with a savage scorn.  He remembered his father, the night he died, had said in his weak ravings that God was love.  Was He?  No wonder, then, He was the God of women, and children, and unsuccessful men.  For him, he was done with it.  He was here with stronger purpose than to yield to weaknesses of the flesh.  He had made his choice,—­a straight, hard path upwards; he was deaf now and forever to any word of kindness or pity.  As for this woman beside him, he would be just to her, in justice to himself:  she never should know the loathing in his heart:  just to her as to all living creatures.  Some little, mean doubt kept up a sullen whisper of bought and sold,—­sold,—­but he laughed it down.  He sat there with his head steadily turned towards her:  a kingly face, she called it, and she was right,—­it was a kingly face:  with the same shallow, fixed smile on his mouth,—­no weary cry went up to God that day so terrible in its pathos, I think:  with the same dull consciousness that this was the trial night of his life,—­that with the homely figure on the road-side he had turned his back on love and kindly happiness and warmth, on all that was weak and useless in the world.  He had made his choice; he would abide by it,—­he would abide by it.  He said that over and over again, dulling down the death-gnawing of his outraged heart.

Miss Herne was quite contented, sitting by him, with herself, and the admiring world.  She had no notion of trial nights in life.  Not many temptations pierced through her callous, flabby temperament to sting her to defeat or triumph.  There was for her no under-current of conflict, in these people whom she passed, between self and the unseen power that Holmes sneered at, whose name was love; they were nothing but movables, pleasant or ugly to look at, well- or ill-dressed.  There were no dark iron bars across her life for her soul to clutch and shake madly,—­nothing “in the world amiss, to be unriddled by-and-by.”  Little Margaret, sitting by the muddy road, digging her fingers dully into the clover-roots, while she looked at the spot where the wheels had passed, looked at life differently, it may be;—­or old Joe Yare by the furnace-fire, his black face and gray hair bent over a torn old spelling-book Lois had given him.  The night perhaps was going to be more to them than so many rainy hours for sleeping,—­the time to be looked back on through coming lives as the hour when good and ill came to them, and they made their choice, and, as Holmes said, did abide by it.