Having stalked indignantly onward for a few paces, the doctor discovered that his wife had not followed him, and turning he called savagely:  “Pepeeta, come!  It is folly to try and p-p-persuade him.  Let us leave the saint to his prayers!  But let him remember the old p-p-proverb, ‘young saint, old sinner!’ Come!”

He proceeded towards the carriage; but Pepeeta seemed rooted to the ground, and David was equally incapable of motion.  While they stood thus, gazing into each other’s eyes, they saw nothing and they saw all.  That brief glance was freighted with destiny.  A subtle communication had taken place between them, although they had not spoken; for the eye has a language of its own.

What was the meaning of that glance?  What was the emotion that gave it birth in the soul?  He knew!  It told its own story.  To their dying day, the actors in that silent drama remembered that glance with rapture and with pain.

Pepeeta spoke first, hurriedly and anxiously:  “What did you say last night about the ‘light of life?’ Tell me!  I must know.”

“I said there is a light that lighteth every man that cometh into the world.”

“And what did you mean?  Be quick.  There is only a moment.”

“I meant that there is a light that shines from the soul itself and that in this light we may walk, and he who walks in it, walks safely.  He need never fall!”

“Never?  I do not understand; it is beautiful; but I do not understand!”

“Pepeeta!” called her husband, angrily.

She turned away, and David watched her gliding out of his sight, with an irrepressible pain and longing.  “I suppose she is his daughter,” he said to himself, and upon that natural but mistaken inference his whole destiny turned.  Something seemed to draw him after her.  He took a step or two, halted, sighed and returned to his labor.

But it was to a strangely altered world that he went.  Its glory had vanished; it was desolate and empty, or so at least it seemed to him, for he confounded the outer and the inner worlds, as it was his nature and habit to do.  It was in his soul that the change had taken place.  The face of a bad man and of an incomprehensible woman followed him through the long furrows until the sun went down.  He was vaguely conscious that he had for the first time actually encountered those strenuous elements which draw manhood from its moorings.  He felt humiliated by the recognition that he was living a dream life there in his happy valley; and that there was a life outside which he could not master so easily.  That confidence in his strength and incorruptibility which he had always felt began to waver a little.  His innocence appeared to him like that of the great first father in the garden of Eden, before his temptation, and now that he too had listened to the voice of the serpent and had for the first time been stirred at the description of the sweetness of the great tree’s fruit,