Then he sat rigid, listening, the blade of his knife still in the pie and his hand gripping the haft. Some one was singing on the moor among the yellow gorse and broom. The voice was a girl’s voice, gay and birdlike and challenging. Martin sat there with a face like a ghost’s, his heart beating fast, his eyes staring through the open doorway. For the voice seemed to speak to him of all that he had sought in the Forest and had not found. It was youth calling to youth in the spring of the year. The voice grew fainter and fainter; it seemed to be dying away over the moor. Martin Valliant’s eyes dilated, his knees shook together. He started up, knocking over the stool, and rushed out of the cell like a madman, his eyes full of a fanatical fire. The voice had ceased singing. He climbed to the place where the wooden cross stood, and looked fiercely about him. But he saw nothing, nothing but the gorse and broom and heather. He went down among the green gorse banks, searched, and found nothing. Sweat stood on his forehead, and his heart was hammering under his ribs. Then he crossed himself, fell on his knees, and prayed. The first thing he did on reaching his cell was to take the loaves and the cooked meat and throw them into the fire under the oven. _Chapter VI_ When a man has done what he believes to be a good deed he is flushed for a while with a happy self-righteousness, and may forget the struggle he had with his own soul. So it was with Martin Valliant. He had no quarrel with himself or with his loneliness for the rest of that day. He had won a victory; he had been tempted of the Devil and had refused the meats that the Devil had cooked for him. Strange—this fear of the white body or the lips of a woman, this naïve cowardice that dares not look into Nature’s eyes. In it one beholds the despair of saints who see no hope for man save in the crushing of the body to save the soul. The few struggle toward a cold triumph, maimed, but half human. With holy ferocity they run about to persuade humanity that God is without sex. Men may listen to them; the deserts become filled with monks; Nature is flouted for a while. Then the thing becomes no more than a rotten shell; men obey their impulses but still wear their vows; cynicism and a lewd hypocrisy are born; the great realities are glozed over. Then comes the day when a more youthful and noble generation wakes to the horror of such a superstition. Gates are torn off their hinges; walls battered down; the slime and the refuse exposed to the sunlight. The new generation runs to the woods and the fields like a flock of children released from some abominable pedantry. They are no longer afraid. The world grows young and beautiful again. There is no sin in the sunset, no shame in the singing of birds.