appearance at the chapel, they all three walked a little way together, and the good-looking young man paid Norah compliments about her singing, and held her hand and patted it.  Nothing could have been more innoxious, more completely ministerial; and yet Dale had felt that he would like to take the clerical gentleman by the collar of his black coat and the seat of his gray trousers, and send him sprawling over a quick-set hedge into a ploughed field.

He knew then the nature of the poison that had crept insidiously into his blood and was beginning to spread and rage with deadly power.  He fought against it bravely, he fought against it despairingly.  He hoped that chance would cure him, he prayed that heaven would cleanse him.

He would not believe that his ruin was irretrievable.  That would be too monstrous and absurd.  Because, except for this expanding trouble, everything inside him, all the main component parts that made up the vast and still solid thinking organism which had been labeled for external observers by the name of William Dale, remained quite unchanged.  His religious faith stood absolutely firm, was strengthened rather than shaken; he regarded his wife with exactly the same affection; he loved his children as much as, more than ever; only this astounding dreadful new thing was added to him:  he worshiped Norah.

In his struggles to free himself from the new mental growth, he had turned to his children.  Instinct seemed to say that from them and through them should come an influence sufficiently potent to resist temptation, however tremendous.  He felt so proud of the boy.  Billy was never afraid of him, looked at him so firmly even when threatened, holding up the pink and white face, with its soft unformed features and yet a determined set to the chin and mouth already—­a real little man.  Dale took his son’s hand in his, took Billy with him into the granary, the hay loft, or across the fields, cut bits of willow and showed how to make a whistle, took a hedge sparrow’s nest and blew the eggs; and the boy was proud and happy in such noble society, but he could not exorcise the evil spell for his grand companion.

Nor could Rachel give freedom.  Dale embraced his daughter with the truest paternal fervor, pumping up sweet clean love from deep unsullied wells, thinking honestly and as of old so long as she stood by his side.  At such moments he forced himself to imagine a man playing the fool with Rachel, and immediately there came a full normal explosion of parental rage; and he knew, without the possibility of doubt, that such a man had better never have been born than encounter Rachel’s father.  But these imaginations could not help him.  Thoughts about Rachel and thoughts about Norah, which once had mingled, were now like two rivers running side by side but never meeting.

Again, what had rendered the fight hopeless was his recognition of the overwhelming fact that the spell was mutual.  It was not only that he wanted her, Norah wanted him.  There lay the sweetly venomous throb of the poison.  In her eyes he was not old; his gray hair did not appall her, his rugged frame did not repel her.  All night and all day, during months, yes, during years, she had told him:  “You are not old; you need not be old; I can make you young.”