The words fired the young man.  He took up his hat, which had fallen upon the floor.

“If that be so, the sooner that this house is rid of the presence of a stranger and a rebel the better for it, and the happier for you.  I thank you for all the kindness you have shown to me, and I bid you, with true affection and respect, farewell!”

So, without wailing even to go up-stairs for anything belonging to him, and with no further word on either side, Ralph Peden stepped into the clear, sobering midnight, the chill air meeting him like a wall.  The stars had come out and were shining frosty-clear, though it was June.

And as soon as he was gone out the minister fell on his knees, and so continued all the night praying with his face to the earth.

CHAPTER XXXIII.

Jock Gordon takes A hand.

Whatever is too precious, too tender, too good, too evil, too shameful, too beautiful for the day, happens in the night.  Night is the bath of life, the anodyne of heartaches, the silencer of passions, the breeder of them too, the teacher of those who would learn, the cloak that shuts a man in with his own soul.  The seeds of great deeds and great crimes are alike sown in the night.  The good Samaritan doeth his good by stealth; the wicked one cometh and soweth his tares among the wheat.  The lover and the lustful person, the thief and the thinker, the preacher and the poacher, are abroad in the night.  In factories and mills, beside the ceaseless whirl of machinery, stand men to whom day is night and night day.  In cities the guardians of the midnight go hither and thither with measured step under the drizzling rain.  No man cares that they are lonely and cold.  Yet, nevertheless, both light and darkness, night and day, are but the accidents of a little time.  It is twilight—­the twilight of the morning and of the gods—­that is the true normal of the universe.  Night is but the shadow of the earth, light the nearness of the central sun.  But when the soul of man goeth its way beyond the confines of the little multiplied circles of the system of the sun, it passes at once into the dim twilight of space, where for myriads of myriad miles there is only the grey of the earliest God’s gloaming, which existed just so or ever the world was, and shall be when the world is not.  Light and dark, day and night, are but as the lights of a station at which the train does not stop.  They whisk past, gleaming bright but for a moment, and the world which came out of great twilight plunges again into it, perhaps to be remade and reillumined on some eternal morning.

It is good for man, then, to be oftentimes abroad in the early twilight of the morning.  It is primeval-instinct with possibilities of thought and action.  Then, if at all, he will get a glimpse into his soul that may hap to startle him.  Judgment and the face of God justly angry seem more likely and actual things than they do in the city when the pavements are thronged and at every turning some one is ready for good or evil to hail you “fellow.”