In the course of a week a very trying matter came to a head. While it was maturing the vicar kept his own counsel very strictly. He did not go near Hart’s Ghyll, nor did he mention the subject to Edith. But one evening he dined three quarters of an hour earlier than usual, and then as the shadows were deepening upon Ashdown he took his hat and made his way to the common along the familiar path. As he came to Parson’s Corner, the village name for the lane’s debouch to the green, he stopped and looked furtively about. By the priest’s stone, still clearly visible in the evening half-light, a slight, frail, bareheaded figure was kneeling as if in prayer. The vicar took out his watch and consulted it anxiously, and then he scanned all points of the compass with an air of painful expectancy. Careful arrangements had been made with the proper authorities and disagreeable, even repugnant as was the whole matter, he felt it to be his duty to see them carried out. The shadows grew deeper upon Ashdown. At last there came a distant crunch of gravel, and the vicar perceived a closed motor car creeping up stealthily from the village and past the widow’s cottage. As it came slowly toward him round the bend in the road he hailed it with a wave of the hand. It stopped within a few yards and two burly, sinister-looking men got out. “Good evening, sir,” said the foremost of these. Involuntarily the vicar held up a finger. “He’s there,” he whispered. And he pointed to the figure kneeling by the stone. He then added in a voice of deepening emotion, “I trust you will not use any kind of violence.” There was no need to do so, for it proved an extremely simple matter. Yet one witness of it was never to forget the scene that followed. Very cautiously the two men crept across the grass, while the vicar, unwilling to be seen by the victim, concealed himself in a thicket near by. From his ambush he saw the man rise to his feet at the approach of his captors, he saw his calm, fixed look, and he heard the singular words proceed from his lips, “Father, forgive them; for they know not what they do.” A feeling of indignant horror swept through Mr. Perry-Hennington. He could only interpret the speech as one more atrocious blasphemy, for he had caught the strange upward look, as if to the God in the sky, which had accompanied the words. Somehow the gesture had revolted him, yet in another in such circumstances it would have been sublime. And the almost beautiful humility of the man walking passively between his captors through the summer twilight to his doom, with such words on his lips, such thoughts in his heart, filled the vicar with an odd conflict of sensations.