Suddenly, however, at the corner of a lane which crossed the road he paused. He heard behind him the sound of heavy feet nearing him with a quick tramp which somehow presented to his mind the idea of a purpose, and for some reason, not exactly clear to himself, he turned about and waited. "Who's that theer?" he asked. "It's me," he was answered. "Stand up and take thy thrashin', my lad." The next instant he was struggling in the darkness with an assailant, and the air was hot with oaths, and they were writhing together and panting, and striking blinding blows. Sometimes it was one man and then the other who was uppermost, but at last it was Haworth, and he had his man in his grasp. "This is because you hit the wrong mark, my lad," he said. "Because luck went agen you, and because it's gone agen me." When he had done Mr. Reddy lay beaten into seeming insensibility. He had sworn and gnashed his teeth and beaten back in vain. "Who is it, by----?" he panted. "Who is it?" "It's Haworth," he was answered. "Jem Haworth, my lad." And he was left there lying in the dark while Haworth walked away, his heavy breathing a living presence in the air until he was gone. CHAPTER XXXVII. A SUMMER AFTERNOON. "Let it stay there a while," Murdoch had said. "I am not ready for it yet." And it staid there between the head-stone and the old stone wall covered with the long grass and closed in by it. He was not ready for it--yet. The days were not long enough for him as it was. His mother and Christian rarely saw him, but at such times as they did each recognized in him a new look and understood it. He began to live a strange, excited life. Rachel Ffrench did nothing by halves. He was seen with her constantly. It continually happened that where she was invited he was invited also. He forgot that he dreaded to meet strangers and had always held aloof from crowds. There were no strangers now and no crowds; in any gathering there was only one presence and this was enough for him. When people would have cultivated him and drawn him out, he did not see their efforts; when men and women spoke to him they found that he scarcely heard them and that even as they talked he had unconsciously veered toward another point. He did things sometimes which made them stare at him. "The fellow is like a ghost," a man said of him once.