Once or twice Mellis glanced back over her shoulder. She had divined what was passing in Martin Valliant’s heart; she half expected to find herself alone, or to see him stalking away over the moor. Had she suffered less herself, she might have reasoned with him, tried to spur him against the world; but her own heart was full of sadness, and sorrow is a great teacher. She had fought to save him from his own fanaticism, and she had won a victory; but she was too full of pity for the man to torture him with more grim home-truths. Fate seemed to have tossed them together into the unknown. She chose to let Fate settle the matter. The man should be free to repent and go. They crossed the moor and reached the beech woods without adventure, and Mellis’s heart beat with a lessened feeling of suspense when the green trees hid them. It was one of those soft, cloudy, windless days when the Forest seemed to gather an added mystery, and the great aisles looked more solemn, hiding strange secrets. “It is good to be here.” She breathed the words like a prayer. “There is no cleaner thing than the Forest. The trees have no sins to remember.” Martin did not answer her. He was gazing along the green aisles and up into the tops of the great trees where a vague shimmer of light played above the black branches. The stillness was miraculous; not a leaf was moving; the huge gray trunks looked strong enough to carry the world. Then he fell to watching the figure of the girl in front of him, with its gown of green that seemed part of the woodland. She walked lightly, bravely, the horse plodding placidly at her heels as though he recognized in her a wise power that was to be trusted and obeyed. And in watching her Martin Valliant was led toward a new humility, and an unforeseen conquest of his own perplexities. It was her loneliness, and her courage in bearing it, that routed the scandalized selfishness of the monk and stirred the deeper compassion of the man. He remembered yesterday’s despair in her eyes and the words of anguish he had heard her utter. She seemed to stand alone in this great wilderness, a wounded thing at the mercy of some brutal chance, a white martyr to be torn and ravished by such ruffians as Noble Vance. What were his own sorrows compared with hers? How much more grim and real the dangers that threatened her! A sudden shame seized him; his eyes lost their sullen, doubting look; his face became transfigured. He had been worshiping self all the while, and, like a Pharisee, he had broken into pious wailings because blood had spotted his precious robe. Yes, he had made an idol of his own sinlessness, bowed down to it, thought of it as the one great thing in the world.