But the preacher saw no one, heard no one. He staggered out of the graveyard and into the road. He turned through an open gate on his left, and crossed some scanty, sheep-shaven pasture land; the half-starved sheep looked blankly at him, and a bare-ribbed cow stared at him in surprise over a neighbouring wall. Gabriel Hirst awoke to reality; he saw the sunlight on the ridges, and the warm shadows in the hollows; he felt the fresh wind on his face; he heard the call of a linnet from a village garden behind him: and one and all were agony to the would-be man of God. He felt himself full of the lusts of the flesh--a vague, idealistic flesh whose boundaries were infinite, whose sinfulness knew no limits; he could not understand the sunshine, save as a light to search out his own evil-doing; and he magnified his worthlessness, because he could remember no tangible sin by which to reduce his wild imaginings to a sober standard. He went through a gap in the wall which confronted him, and stood looking dreamily down on a little wooded dell, through which a moor stream bubbled its way to the river. On a sudden his body grew rigid, his eyes lost their glow of introspection and fixed themselves on a rounded basin of the stream. A girl was paddling in the water, and was singing a love-ballad, in a rich, south-country voice that contrasted oddly with her northern surroundings. The preacher pressed one hand close upon his heart, and let his eyes note the slender lines of the girl's figure, fast ripening towards womanhood. She seemed fresh and sweet as the wind and sun and water that played with her. Gabriel Hirst looked at the lassie's face, and his pulses leaped to a new delight. He lost his rigid set of body, and stretched out both arms wide to the moors; this was his apology for past misrepresentations. Down the steep hillside he went, stumbling into rabbit-holes, pricking his ankles with thistle-needles, falling and picking himself up again. The girl became aware of an intruder: she glanced up the hill, and left the water, and seated herself on a pine-log that lay beside the stream. By the time that Gabriel Hirst had reached the brook and jumped it, her little white feet were safely under cover. He stopped; the inspiration that had led him here was at an end, and he had no knowledge of the things that young men say to maidens. "Why didn't you turn back when you saw me?" demanded the girl. A red flush, of shame and anger mixed, had risen to her cheeks. Not a word spoke Gabriel Hirst. His late fervour at the chapel, his lifetime of repression and battling against the vital part of himself, seemed to have been swept clear away; he could do nothing but wonder at this new-found form of Grace. She laughed, a little, musical, defiant laugh.