"Gabriel, what is it? I have a right to know," she said. He saw it all now. It was very plain to be read, even by Gabriel Hirst, who had ever been slow to learn these womanish matters. The swift knowledge that she loved him seemed to give him nerve to go forward with his tale. "I came up Hazel Dene this morning," he began, without any beating about the bush. "I saw you and Griff Lomax--the woman I loved, and the friend I trusted--sitting beside the stream. You were laughing and jesting--at me and my blundering love-ways, I told myself--I thought you had met there often. I waited for Griff on the moor, and we fought. It was close to the edge of Whins Quarry, though it had gone clean out of my head how near we were. The devil entered fairly into me at last, and I closed with Griff a second time and flung him over my shoulder. He dropped clean into the quarry, and I heard him splash into the water at the bottom." She loosened her hold of him and fell back with a moan. There could be no doubting his story. Soon she began to frame excuses for him, with a woman's nimble wit. She spoke after a long while. "Gabriel, it was a fair fight. You did not know of the quarry; you---- Gabriel, did you do it for my sake?" "Not for your sake," he muttered huskily. "Don't think, child, that _the sin_ was for your sake; that couldn't be. I was mad with jealousy." "But the jealousy was mine?" Strange how she had already set aside the catastrophe, as being a matter of lighter moment. "I loved you too well, Greta, and the Lord grudged it," said the preacher simply. The girl got up from her chair and stood eye to eye with him. "Love!" she cried, with a little sobbing catch in her voice. "What do you mean by love, Gabriel Hirst?" A quiver ran through the preacher. His eyes dilated. His hands went out and gripped invisible shapes. "Love is a thing that makes you run mad and grovel like a beast--that makes you run sane and soar like an angel. Love is more than the Law and the Prophets, and a lifetime of fighting with the devil.--Nay, Greta, forgive me. Lass, I yearn for you so--and--I--forget that I am a murderer." "You love like that?" said Greta, slowly. "Then, dear, you can take me and do what you will with me." The preacher felt two arms about his neck, and a warm mouth against his own. Murder, and sin, and vengeance of the Lord, they were all blotted out for one full moment. He knew himself a man. CHAPTER XXI. AFTERWARDS. Just as Greta and the preacher, in Miller Rotherson's parlour, were struggling out of their dream--just as the woman was beginning to wonder how it would fare with Gabriel if Lomax were really dead, while the man was framing a resolve that touched the present--there came a rattle, and a whirr, and a grinding of iron against iron from outside the house. The rattle settled into a steady, rhythmic boom. Gabriel thought of Invisible Powers, but Greta could have cried tears of joy because of the relief afforded by the interruption.