The words that came in return seemed singularly irrelevant.  “What about the find of asbestos the surveyor thought he’d got on the hills where Bates’s clearing is?  Has Bates got a big offer for the land?”

“He has had some correspondence about it,” said Trenholme, stiffly.

“He’ll be a rich man yet,” remarked the American, gloomily.  “Asbestos mines are piling in dollars, I can tell you.  It’s a shame, to my mind, that a snapping crab-stick like that old Bates should have it all.”  He rose as with the irritation of the idea, but appeared arrested as he looked down at the dead man.  “And when I think how them poor ladies got their white skirts draggled, I do declare I feel cut up to that extent I wouldn’t care for an asbestos mine if somebody came and offered it to me for nothing this minute.”

Then, too absorbed in feeling to notice the bathos of his speech, he put his hands in his pockets, and began strolling up and down a beat of his own, a few yards from the track Trenholme had made, and on the other side of the dead.

As they walked at different paces, and passing each other at irregular times, perhaps the mind of each recurred to the remembrance of the other ghostly incident and the rumour that the old man had already risen once.  The open spot of sloping ground surrounded by high black trees, which had been so lately trodden by many feet, seemed now the most desolate of desolate places.  The hymn, the prayer, that had arisen there seemed to leave in the air only that lingering influence which past excitement lends to its acute reaction.

A sudden sharp crack and rustling, coming from out the gloom of the trees, startled them.

“Ho!” shouted the American.  “Stand!  Is there any one there?”

And Alec in his heart called him a fool for his pains, and yet he himself had not been less startled.  Nothing more was heard.  It was only that time—­time, that mysterious medium through which circumstance comes to us from the source of being; that river which, unseen, unfelt, unheard, flows onward everywhere—­had just then brought the moment for some dead branch to fall.

END OF BOOK II.

BOOK III.

“Nothing is inexorable but Love.”

CHAPTER I.

That which is to be seen of any event, its causes and consequences, is never important compared with the supreme importance of those unseen workings of things physical and things spiritual which are the heart of our life.  The iceberg of the northern seas is less than its unseen foundations; the lava stream is less than the molten sea whence it issues; the apple falling to the ground, and the moon circling in her orbit, are less than the great invisible force which controls their movements and the movements of all the things that do appear.  The crime is not so great as its motive, nor yet as its results; the beneficent deed is not so great as the beneficence of which it is but a fruit; yet we cannot see beneficence, nor motives, nor far-reaching results.  We cannot see the greatest forces, which in hidden places, act and counteract to bring great things without observation; we see some broken fragments of their turmoil which now and again are cast up within our sight.