So Gabriel took the girl home about eleven of the next morning, and, finding Miller Rotherson just returned from his journey, gave the kindly old man a full and faithful account of the whole affair. The miller rubbed his chin when Gabriel had finished, and looked at him quizzically. "So you want to marry my daughter? Well, I don't know about that. It seems to me you're far too hot-headed to be comfortable as a son-in-law. For all that, I can't rightly see that you show up so badly in the matter. You fought because--but we won't go into that. At any rate, if it weren't for you, I should have neither daughter nor mill at this moment. But to marry her--it's asking a deal; well, we must think about it." And soon after that it was known through the length and breadth of Ling Crag village and Marshcotes parish that Gabriel Hirst and the miller's daughter were "bahn to be wed." Betty Binns named Greta "a forrard young hussie, about as fit to be a godly man's wife as skim-milk is fit to butter your bread;" and the rest of the village thought as much--for was not poor Greta "a furriner"? And this was the beginning of a hard time for the preacher. He had trafficked too little in happiness to accept it quietly when it came. He felt an earnest need for some set-off in the shape of misery, and he had that fight with Griff ready to his conscience. The more he pondered over it, the greater seemed his offence. True, Griff looked at him nowadays with a kindlier eye than ever before; true, the sin had brought him his heart's desire (next after God, he added, but the parenthesis carried little conviction even to himself). But was the sin any the less in that it had borne good fruit? If he held that, he was no better than a papist, an idolater--and that was almost the hardest rap Gabriel could give himself. In the middle of his troublous time, there came a strange preacher to the Ling Crag chapel, to conduct the anniversary services there. He was known throughout the country, the Rev. Abel Bell, as a powerful mover of men's hearts, and the Ling Crag folk expected great things of him. Nor were they disappointed; the stranger, at the end of half a dozen sentences, had put himself out of reach of the captious criticism to which the villagers were wont to treat their superiors in godliness; before they had recovered from this unwonted sense of inability to carp, they were snared into enthusiasm. There was a meeting of the class-leaders after morning service, and they unanimously decided to ask the new preacher to stay for a few days and conduct a series of "Revival" services. Gabriel Hirst was ripe for any wildness when Wednesday came. The three Sunday services, with the evening calls to the unconverted on Monday and Tuesday, had already wrought him to a high pitch of nervous tension; contact with Greta and that growing sense of his unworthiness combined to bring him up to fever heat.