because the thought of it was a pleasure.  Inverted instincts and a mind fouled by promptings from without, led him to understand that Ironsyde was his mother’s enemy and therefore his own.  Baggs had told him so in a malignant moment and Abel believed it.  To injure his enemy was to honour his mother.  And the time had come to do so.  He was ripe for it to-night.  He told himself that Peter Grim would have approved the blow, and with his mind a chaos of mistaken opinions, at once ludicrous and mournful, he set himself to his task.  He ate his supper as usual and went to bed; but when the house was silent in sleep, he rose, put on his clothes and hastened out of doors.  He departed by a window on the ground floor and slipped into a night of light and shade, for the moon was full and rode through flying clouds.

The boy felt a youthful malefactor’s desire to get his task done as swiftly as possible.  He was impatient to feel the deed behind him.  He ran through the deserted village, crossed a little bridge over the river, and then approached the Mill by a meadow below them.  Thus he always came to see Mr. Baggs, or anybody who was friendly.

The roof of the works shone in answer to fitful moonlight, and they presented to his imagination a strange and unfamiliar appearance.  Under the sleight of the hour they were changed and towered majestically above him.  The Mill slept and in the creepy stillness, the river’s voice, which he had hardly heard till now, was magnified to a considerable murmur.  From far away down the valley came the song of the sea, where a brisk, westerly wind threw the waves on the shingle.

A feeling of awe numbed him, but it was not powerful enough to arrest his purpose.  His plans had been matured for many days.

He meant to burn down the Mill.

Nothing was easier and a match in the inflammable material, of which the hackler’s shop was usually full, must quickly involve the mass of the buildings.

It was fitting that where he had been impregnated by Mr. Baggs with much lawless opinion, Abel should give expression to his evil purpose.  From the tar-pitched work-room of the hackler, fire would very quickly leap to the main building against which it stood, and might, indeed, under the strong wind, involve the stores also and John Best’s dwelling between them.  But it was fated otherwise.  A very small incident served to prevent a considerable catastrophe, and when Abel broke the window of the hackling room, turned the hasp, raised it, and got in, a man lay awake in pain not thirty yards distant.  The lad lighted a candle, which he had brought with him, and it was then, while he collected a heap of long hemp and prepared to set it on fire, that John Best, in torture from toothache, went downstairs for a mouthful of brandy.