To do him justice, now that the time had come for an acknowledgment he felt no temptation to evade the judgment of his own mind, nor to cheat himself with the belief that the boy was marked for ruin before he saw him--that Will had worked out, in vicious weakness, his own end. It was not the weakness, after all, that he had played upon--it was rather the excitable passion and the whimpering fears of the hereditary drunkard. He remembered now the long days that he had given to his revenge, the nights when he had tossed sleepless while he planned a widening of the breach with Fletcher. That, at least was his work, and his alone--the bitter hatred, more cruel than death, with which the two now stood apart and snarled. It was a human life that he had taken in his hand--he saw that now in his first moment of awakening--a life that he had destroyed as deliberately as if he had struck it dead before him. Day by day, step by step, silent, unswerving, devilish, he had kept about his purpose, and now at the last he had only to sit still and watch his triumph. With a sob, he bowed his head in his clasped hands, and so shut out the light. CHAPTER X. By the Poplar Spring The next day he watched for her anxiously until she appeared over the low brow of the hill, her arms filled with books, and Agag trotting at her side. As she descended slowly into the broad ravine where he awaited her under six great poplars that surrounded the little spring, he saw that she wore a dress of some soft, creamy stuff and a large white hat that shaded her brow and eyes. She looked younger, he noticed, than she had done in her black gown, and he recalled while she neared him the afternoon more than six years before when she had come suddenly upon him while he worked in his tobacco. "So you are present at the roll-call?" she said, laughing, as she sat down on the bench beside him and spread out the books that she had brought. "Why, I've been sitting here for half an hour," he answered. "What a shame--that's a whole furrow unploughed, isn't it?" "Several of them; but I'm not counting furrows now. I'm getting ready to appall you by my ignorance." He spoke with a determined, reckless gaiety that lent a peculiar animation to his face. "If you are waiting for that, you are going to be disappointed," she replied, smiling, "for I've put my heart into the work, and I was born and patterned for a teacher; I always knew it. We're going to do English literature and a first book in Latin." "Are we?" He picked up the Latin grammar and ran his fingers lightly through the pages. "I went a little way in this once," he said. "I got as far as 'omnia vincit amor' and stopped. Tobacco conquered me instead." She caught up his gay laugh. "Well, we'll try it over again," she returned, and held out the book.