“I wonder if my right foot or my left will step into the lane first.  If it’s my right I’ll have it to mean that I shall be saved....”  Here he paused for a moment, aghast; it was such a tremendous risk to take, such a staking of his soul.  He went forward, measuring the distance with his eye, and trying to calculate which foot would take that fateful step from the cobbles on to the lane.  He was there, and for one awful moment it seemed as though it would be his left, but an extra long stride just met the case.

“It didn’t come quite natural that way,” he thought, anxiously, “but p’raps it means I’ll be saved by something I do myself.  I wish I could be quite sure.  Shall I have it that if I see a crow in the field I shall be saved?”

The reflection that for a dozen times on entering the pasture he saw no crow for once that he did made him change to, “Suppose I say if I don’t see a crow I shall be saved?” But that too had its drawback, as if, after laying a wager in which the odds were so tremendously in his favour, he did see a crow, there would then be no smoothing away the fact, as often before, with “Perhaps that doesn’t count”—­it would be too obviously a sign from Heaven.  He finally changed the wager to, “If I see birds in the field I’ll see Phoebe to-day:”  to such considerations does a man turn after contemplation of his soul.  On seeing a couple of magpies, the white and black of their plumage showing silver and iridescent green in the sun as they swooped over the field, he took steps to justify the omen by setting off across the moors in quest of Phoebe.

CHAPTER II

THE MILL

As Ishmael went along he picked a large bunch of the wayside flowers as an offering to Phoebe—­purple knapweed and betony, the plumy dead-pink heads of hemp-agrimony, and tufts of strong yellow fleabane, all squeezed together in his hot little hand.  The air seemed alive with butterflies and moths, white and brown and red, and clouds of the “blue skippers” that look like periwinkles blown to life.  A bee shot past him so quickly that the thrum of it sounded short as a twanged string, and the next moment a late foxglove spire, naked save for its topmost bell, quivered beneath the onslaught of the arched brown and yellow body.  The heat haze shimmered on the distant horizon like an insect’s wing, but was tempered on the moorland height by the capricious wind, and Ishmael kept doggedly on.

He was a wiry little boy, thin and brown, with dark hair that grew in a point on the nape of his neck, and hazel eyes set rather deeply under straight, sulky-looking brows.  The lower part of his face was small and pointed for the breadth across forehead and cheek bones, and, with his outstanding ears, combined to give him something the look of a piskie’s changeling.  Already the first innocence of childhood was wearing away, and the deliberate cleanliness of mind achieved,