He had no home, no refuge! Then first, not when alone in the beleaguered city, he knew desolation. He had never knocked at the door of heaven, and earth had closed hers! An angel who needed no flaming sword to make her awful, held the gate of his lost paradise against him. None but she could open to him, and he knew that, like God himself, Kirsty was inexorable. Left alone with that last terrible look from the eyes of the one being he loved, he threw himself in despair on the ground. True love is an awful thing, not to the untrue only, but sometimes to the growing-true, for to everything that can be burned it is a consuming fire. Never more, it seemed, would those eyes look in at his soul’s window without that sad, indignant repudiation in them! He rose, and crept into the earth-house. Kirsty lost herself in prayer as she went. ‘Lord, I hae dune a’ I can!’ she said. ‘Until thou hast dune something by thysel, I can do naething mair. He’s i’ thy han’s still, I praise thee, though he’s oot o’ mine! Lord, gien I hae dune him ony ill, forgie me; a puir human body canna ken aye the best! Dinna lat him suffer for my ignorance, whether I be to blame for ’t or no. I will try to do whatever thou makest plain to me.’ By the time she reached home she was calm. Her mother saw and respected her solemn mood, gave her a mother’s look, and said nothing: she knew that Kirsty, lost in her own thoughts, was in good company. What was passing in the soul of Francis Gordon, I can only indicate, I cannot show. The most mysterious of all vital movements, a generation, a transition, was there--how initiated, God only knows. Francis knew neither whence it came nor whither it went. He was being re-born from above. The change was in himself; the birth was that of his will. It was his own highest action, therefore all God’s. He was passing from death into life, and knew it no more than the babe knows that he is being born. The change was into a new state of being, of the very existence of which most men are incredulous, for it is beyond preconception, capable only of being experienced. Thorough as is the change, the man knows himself the same man, and yet would rather cease to be, than return to what he was. The unknown germ in him, the root of his being, yea, his very being itself, the holy thing which is his intrinsic substance, hitherto unknown to his consciousness, has begun to declare itself, and the worm is passing into the butterfly, the creeping thing into the Psyche. It is a change in which God is the potent presence, but which the man must _will_, or remain the gaoler who prisons in loathsomeness his own God-born self, and chokes the fountain of his own liberty.