'I'll give it up if you'll chuck the parson.' 'I won'er you dunna see 'em, nights, watching you out of the black dark with their gold eyes, like kingcups, and the look in 'em of things dying hard. I won'er you dunna hear 'em screaming.' His cause was lost, and he knew it, but he pleaded on. 'No. If I hadna swore by the Mountain I wouldna come,' she said. 'You've got blood on you.' At that moment a neighbour passed and offered Hazel a lift. Now that she was marrying a minister, she had become a personality. Hazel climbed in and drove off, and Reddin's tragic moment died, as great fires die, into grey ash. He went home heavily. His way lay past the parsonage where Edward and his mother slept peacefully. The white calm of unselfish love wrapped Edward, for he felt that he could make Hazel happy. As he fell asleep that night he thought: 'She was made for a minister's wife.' Reddin, leaning heavily on the low wall, staring at the drunken tombstones and the quiet moon-silvered house, thought: 'She was made for me.' Both men saw her as what they wanted her to be, not as she was. Many thoughts darkened Reddin's face as he stood there hour after hour in the cold May night. The rime whitened his broad shoulders as he leaned on the wall, and in the moonlight the sprinkling of white hairs at his temples shone out from the black as if to mock this young passion that had possessed him. God's Little Mountain lay shrugged in slumber; the woods crouched like beaten creatures under the night; the small soft leaves hung limply in the frost. Still Reddin stood there, chilled through and through, brooding upon the house. Not until dawn, like a knife, gashed the east with blood did he stir. He sighed. 'Too late!' he said. Then he laughed. 'Beaten by the parson!' A demoniac rage surged in him. He picked up a piece of rock, and lifting it in both arms, flung it at the house. It smashed the kitchen window. But before Edward came to his window Reddin was out of sight in the batch. 'My dear,' said Mrs. Marston tremulously, 'I always feared disaster from this strange match.' 'How _can_ Hazel have anything to do with it, mother?' 'I think, dear, it is a sign from God. On your wedding-morning! Broken glass! Yes, it is a sign from God. I wish it need not have been quite so violent. But, of course, He knows best.' Chapter 15