“Aye, ’twill last,” replied the circuit steward.  “Sam’s a changed man:  he has gien ower sweerin’, goes no more to t’ public, but bides at home o’ neight an’ sits cowerin’ ower t’ fire readin’ t’ Book.”

The account which the circuit steward gave of the farmer’s conversion was substantially correct, but it did not furnish the whole truth.  The character of his life had changed, but his conversion was only half accomplished.  In the process known as religious conversion there are usually three well-marked stages:  first of all comes conviction of sin, then repentance, and finally a sense of forgiveness and peace.  Learoyd attained the first stage in the process that stormy night in the little Methodist chapel.  In a dull, blurred way he arrived too at a state of repentance for the evil he had done.  But the final stage of pardon and peace remained strange to him, and the chief spiritual effect of his conversion upon him was the attainment of an exquisite agony of soul.  His conscience, long dormant, was roused to feverish activity.  His sins, which were many, haunted him like demons, and chief among these he accounted, not without reason, the wrong he had done to Mary Whittaker.  She came to him in his dreams, and always under the same form.  What he saw was a girl, with downcast eyes and supplicating hands, standing at the foot of the Holmton market-cross, with a halter round her neck.  Nor was it only in his dreams that he saw her.  Sometimes as he led home his horses at nightfall after a day’s ploughmg, the same form, patient and unreproachful, would be seen standing at the open door of the farm waiting to receive him.  With a cowed look on his face he would turn away from the house and pass the night in the hayloft.

The effect of all this upon his constitution was what might have been expected.  One evening, after a night and day of acutest torment, he fell in an epileptic fit upon the kitchen floor, and was found there next morning by a child from the village who had come to the farm for milk.  A doctor was summoned, who brought with him a nurse, and for some days Learoyd’s life hung in the balance.  Recovery came at last but the doctor insisted that he must no longer live alone, but must secure the services of an experienced house-keeper.  In vain did Learoyd protest against this plan.  The medical man remained firm.  The nurse would have to leave in a few days and someone else must take her place.  The farmer would not stir a finger to find such a person, so that the responsibility rested with the doctor.  But all his inquiries availed little.  There was no lack of women suitable for the post, but not one of them would undertake it.  The memory of the scene in the market-place held them back.