Slowly the need of vindication slid into his consciousness. He quickened his pace a little. Righteous anger followed stealthily, telling him that Griff had stooped to the meanest treachery that a man can play his friend. His feet went forward more bravely. Finally, he was all aglow with a rage that swept clean away every despairing thought of loss. He ran like a wild thing through the purpling heather, till Hazel Dene lay a good three miles behind him; he was out of breath by this time, and he sat down in a clump of cranberries to rest awhile. He had gone out that morning with a copy of "Baxter's Call to the Unconverted" under his arm--a book, much in vogue with an earlier generation, in which Gabriel was wont to find strong stuff of a quality he loved. He opened the book at random, hoping to chance upon some counsel fitted to the occasion; but he drew blank, and shut the stained old pages with a snap. One solitary quotation from the Scriptures assailed him with untiring pertinacity. "Vengeance is Mine, saith the Lord," he muttered. He got up from the cranberry-bushes and strode off again across the moor. It hurt him to feel that excuse for action rested, not with himself, but with a Higher Power. A sense of futility weighed him down. The sun was dropping westward before hunger insisted on a hearing. He had been fasting lately, and his body was weakened; old stubbornness bade him fight the hunger, but he remembered that there was no longer a reason for self-castigation--no longer a reason, it seemed, for anything in earth or sky. The scepticism which, years before, had preceded his conversion came and went, alternating with the dulling consciousness that vengeance belonged to the Lord, not to himself. Gabriel Hirst was rudderless in the depths of a stormy sea. Desire for food was the one straightforward agent. He looked across the moor and saw a black-walled cottage standing up against the sky; without conscious thought he took a bee-line, over bog-land and dry, to the cottage. At another time he would have recognized Sorrowstones Spring, but this afternoon the country showed only a blurred, unknown waste. A surly admonition to enter greeted his knock, and he went in. Old Mother Strangeways was taking down a canister of tea from her cupboard; she turned and looked him up and down. "Oh, it's thee, Gabriel Hirst?" she croaked. "What dost 'a want?" "Food. I'm like to drop with hunger." She laughed mirthlessly. "Then drop, tha praching crow. I know thee well; tha'rt friends wi' young Lummax, if I'm noan mista'en." The preacher winced. "I'm no friend of his, nor he of mine." "Art'n't 'a? Sin' when?" "Since the morning. He's played me false, and it's a pity that vengeance belongs to the Lord." Rachel dropped into her chair and motioned Gabriel to take the other. "Tha looks too mich of a fooil to be a liar, Gabriel Hirst," she said meditatively; "what's agate atween thee an' him?"