Burned, he said--burned in the old office that the Yankees fired. He's a scoundrel, I tell you, sir, and I know him to the core. He's a rotten scoundrel!" Carraway caught his breath quickly and drew back as if he had touched unwittingly a throbbing canker. To his oversensitive nature these primal emotions had a crudeness that was vulgar in its unrestraint. He beheld it all--the old wrong and the new hatred--in a horrid glare of light, a disgraceful blaze of trumpets. Here there was no cultured evasion of the conspicuous vice--none of the refinements even of the Christian ethics--it was all raw and palpitating humanity. "Then my mission is quite useless," he confessed. "I can only add that I am sorrier than I can say sorry for the whole thing, too. If my services could be of any use to you I should not hesitate to offer them, but so far as I see there is absolutely nothing to be done. An old crime, as you know, very often conforms to an appearance of virtue." He held out his hand, Christopher shook it, and then the lawyer went back into the house to bid good-by to Mrs. Blake. When he came out a few moments later, and passed through the whitewashed gate into the sunken road, he saw that Christopher was still standing where he had left him, the golden afternoon around him, and the bedraggled ducks paddling at his feet. VIII. Treats of a Passion that is Not Love Over a distant meadow fluted the silver whistle of a partridge, and Christopher, lifting his head, noted involuntarily the direction of the sound. A covey was hatching down by the meadow brook, he knew--for not a summer mating nor a hidden nest had escaped his eyes--and he wondered vaguely if the young birds were roaming into Fletcher's wheatfield. Then, with a single vigorous movement as if he were settling his thoughts upon him, he crossed the yard, leaped the fence by the barnyard, and started briskly along the edge of a little cattle pasture, where a strange bull bellowed in the shadow of a walnut-tree. At the bottom of the pasture a crumbling rail fence divided his land from Fletcher's, and as he looked over the festoons of poisonous ivy he saw Fletcher himself overseeing the last planting of his tobacco. For a time Christopher watched them as through a mist--watched the white and the black labourers, the brown furrows in which the small holes were bored, the wilted plants thrown carelessly in place and planted with two quick pressures of a bare, earth-begrimed foot. He smelled the keen odours released by the sunshine from the broken soil; he saw the standing beads of sweat on the faces of the planters--Negroes with swollen lips and pleasant eyes like those of kindly animals--and he heard the coarse, hectoring voice of Fletcher, who stood midway of the naked ground. To regard the man as a mere usurper of his land had been an article in the religious creed the child had learned, and as he watched him now, bearded, noisy, assured of his