In former times, with grim rebellion gripping him as it gripped him now, Tom would have run away.  But there was a prompting stronger than rebellion:  a sudden melting of the heart that made him remember the loving-kindnesses, and not any of the austerities, of the man who was praying for him, and he sat down on the lowest step to wait.

The twilight was glooming to dusk when Silas Crafts came out of the church and locked the door behind him.  If he were surprised to find Tom waiting for him, he made no sign.  Neither was there any word of greeting passed between them when he gathered his coat tails and sat down on the higher step, self-restraint being a heritage which had come down undiminished from the Covenanter ancestors of both.  A little grayer, a little thinner, but with the deep-set eyes still glowing with the fires of utter convincement and the marvelous voice still unimpaired, Silas Crafts would have refused to believe that the passing years had changed him; yet now there was kinsman love to temper solemn austerity when he spoke to the lost sheep—­as there might not have been in the sterner years.

“The way of the transgressor is hard, grievously hard, Thomas.  I think you are already finding it so, are you not?”

Tom shook his head slowly.

“That doesn’t mean what it used to, to me, Uncle Silas; nothing means the same any more.  It’s just as if somebody had hit that part of me with a club; it’s all numb and dead.  I’m sure of only one thing now:  that is, that I’m not going to be a hypocrite after this, if I can help it.”

The man put his hand on the boy’s knee.

“Have you been that all along, Thomas?”

“I reckon so,”—­monotonously.  “At first it was partly scare, and partly because I knew what mother wanted.  But ever since I’ve been big enough to think, I’ve been asking why, and, as you would say, doubting.”

Silas Crafts was silent for a moment.  Then he said: 

“You have come to the years of discretion, Thomas, and you have chosen death rather than life.  If you go on as you have begun, you will bring the gray hairs of your father and mother in sorrow to the grave.  Leaving your own soul’s salvation out of the question, can you go on and drag an upright, honorable name in the dust and mire of degradation?”

“No,” said Tom definitely.  “And what’s more, I don’t mean to.  I don’t know what Doctor Tollivar wrote you about me, and it doesn’t make any difference now.  That’s over and done with.  You haven’t been seeing me every day for these three weeks without knowing that I’m ashamed of it.”

“Ashamed of the consequences, you mean, Thomas.  You are not repentant.”

“Yes, I am, Uncle Silas; though maybe not in your way.  I don’t allow to make a fool of myself again.”

The preacher’s comment was a groan.

“Tom, my boy, if any one had told me a year ago that a short twelvemonth would make you, not only an apostate to the faith, but a shameless liar as well—­”