They walked on in silence. She turned her face from him and wept on; and Saunders's sense of justice was beginning to be touched--as the sense of justice in the weak so often is--not by the actual rights of the matter, but by his own sentiments. He grew a little less furious. By the time they neared their destination he put out his hand and drew her closer to him. "There, there," he said, speaking more gently, "we'll say no more about it. You'll have more than one gown, I'll go bail, when we're man an' wife." Catherine Dennis's existence had been dependent upon the will of others ever since she could remember and no thought of rebellion against her lover's unreasonableness came to her. A so-called aunt had brought her up and at her death she had gone into service; she had never had any choice in her course of life until 'Black Heber' had found his way into it. Even the quarrel which parted them had been the work of a third person, and Catherine had suffered and wept in secret and been barely consoled by those who never ceased telling her that he was a wild fellow and that she was well rid of him. Only one person had taken a different line, and that was Mrs. Job Williams who lived near Pencoed Chapel, on the lower slope of the Black Mountain. "Mrs. Job," as she was called by her neighbours, was a sharp-featured, middle-aged matron, whose absolute ascendency over her husband had made him almost a negligible quantity with his acquaintance. Her own personality was so marked, and the impression she made upon the minds of her neighbours so keen, that it was considered a lucky thing for Catherine Dennis, tossed about, as she was, to have found anchorage in 'Mrs. Job's' goodwill. Her mission was to keep the little Baptist Chapel of Pencoed in order, and she lived in a cottage beside the green track connecting that place with the more frequented ways along the hill. She was a fervent Baptist and it was owing to her that Catherine had been brought into the community. Only her feeling of responsibility for the girl's soul had prevented her from turning her angular back upon her when Heber arrived one evening at her door, and she discovered that the two had parted; she had wrestled sorely with herself in her determination to keep friendly with Catherine, and that responsibility was probably the one thing that could have enabled her to do so. The girl was impressionable and excitable; she was determined that it should not be her fault if the lamb she had brought into the fold wandered back into the Church. She it was who had influenced Catherine to persuade Saunders to be rebaptized in Bethesda pool. Mrs. Job's heart was hot within her, for she liked the shepherd more than she did most people. She had no child and the lonely visions that came to her of the son she might have borne wore the face of Black Heber.