At the brink of the pool the men who were awaiting baptism were taking off their coats and boots and Saunders stood back again as he saw them making their preparations. The wrath which the sight of Catherine's bare ankles and her thinly veiled body had raised turned every instinct in revolt against the rite he had witnessed. His foolish promise to share in it had been given in the glamour of some tender moment and he felt it would be impossible to redeem it. The whole thing disgusted him; he took his religion and its forms more as a matter of course than as a matter of conviction; and baptism by immersion struck him now as an absurdity for a man--a positive indecency for a woman. As he saw the minister looking towards him he turned away, and went, in a tumult of revulsion, in among the trees. He would have no part with these people. He felt a wide difference between himself and these men and women of the hillside; and he would take care that his wife should have no more to do with them. She had no relations, fortunately, to beset her with their influence. He strode over the channel which was the outlet of the pool, his head down, his angry look fixed on the ground. He would have turned his back upon Bethesda, there and then, had he not told Catherine that he would walk home with her to the farmhouse at which she served. He knew that most of the congregation was aware of his intention to be baptized to-day, and he could not endure the well-meaning glances of inquiry that followed him. He hated every creature in it. He reached a large alder whose divided stems rose from a wet place, dark with that touch of the unhallowed which is the charm of alder trees; Heber was leaning against the trunk amid the thick brush of leaves. He was so appropriate a figure to his surroundings that an imaginative person might have been startled. Saunders, who had for the time being forgotten his existence, stopped. He was not imaginative, but Heber--or, rather, the religious aspect of him--stood in his mind for everything he was rebelling against now; for at this moment Charles felt ready to become an infidel. The other aspect of Heber--the one which had been uppermost while he watched the woman he loved from the alder brake--only struck him as the man spoke. "I thought ye were to go down to the water alongside o' her," he said. "I would ha' done better for her than that." There was savage contempt in his voice. "_You!_" exclaimed the other, catching his breath; "_you_, indeed!" "Yes, I." "Ah! you scoundrel!" cried Saunders suddenly, "you black scoundrel, hiding there among the trees with your eyes on another man's girl!" "She won't be yours long," replied Heber. "No, that she won't!" shouted Saunders, "not if she's going to keep up wi' you folks on the hill! not if she's to make a show of herself and a shame! not if she's to go a different way to heaven from me that's to be her husband! What'll take me there'll take her too, and she shall know it!"