The thought of Will had oppressed him like a nightmare for the last two weeks, and it was almost unconsciously that he tuned now in the direction of the store and passed presently into the shaded lane leading to Sol Peterkin's. His mood was heavy upon him, and so deep was the abstraction in which he walked that it was only when he heard his name called softly from a little distance that he looked up to find Maria Fletcher approaching him over the pale gray shadows in the road. Her eyes were luminous, and she stretched her hand toward him in a happy gesture. "Oh, if you only knew how wonderful I think you!" she cried impulsively. He held her hand an instant, and then letting it fall, withdrew his gaze slowly from her exalted look. The pure heights of her fervour were beyond the reach of his more earthly level, and as he turned from her some old words of her own were respoken in his ears: "Faith and doubt are mere empty forms until we pour out the heart's blood that vivifies them." It was her heart's blood that she had put into her dreams, and it was this, he told himself, that gave her mystic visions their illusive appearance of reality. Beauty enveloped her as an atmosphere; it softened her sternest sacrifice, it coloured her barest outlook, it transformed daily the common road in which she walked, and hourly it sustained and nourished her, as it nourished poor, crippled Tucker on his old pine bench. The eye of the spirit was theirs--this Christopher had learned at last; and he had learned, also, that for him there still remained only the weak, blurred vision of the flesh. "You make me feel the veriest hypocrite," he said at the end of the long pause. She shook her head. "And that you are surely not." "So you still believe in me?" "It's not belief--I KNOW in you." "Well, don't praise me; don't admire me; don't pretend, for God's sake, that I'm anything better than the brute you see." "I don't pretend anything better," she protested; "and when you talk like this it only makes me feel the more keenly your wonderful courage." "I haven't any," he burst out almost angrily. "Not an atom, do you hear? Whatever I may appear on top, at bottom I am a great skulking coward, and nothing more. Why, I couldn't even stay and take my punishment the other day. I sneaked off like a hound." "Your punishment?" she faltered, and he saw her lashes tremble. "For the other day--for the afternoon by the poplar spring. I've been wanting to beg your pardon on my knees." Her lashes were raised steadily, and she regarded him gravely while a slight frown gathered her dark brows. She was still humanly feminine enough to find the apology harder to forgive than the offense. "Oh, I had forgotten," she said a little coldly. "So that was, after all, why you ran away?" "It was not the only reason." "And the other?" He closed his eyes suddenly and drew back. "I ran away because I knew if I stayed I should do it again within two seconds," he replied.