And turning down Mosley Street, all the way he guided her through some side streets where there were fewer people to stare. Such forethought, such gentleness in him were quite new to her. She gradually recovered herself, feeling all the while this young sympathetic presence at her side--dreading lest it should desert her. He meanwhile was still under the tremor and awe of the new experience. So this was dying! He remembered 'Lias holding Margaret's hand. _'Deein's long--but it's varra, varra peaceful. '_ Not always, surely! There must be vigorous, tenacious souls that went out with tempests and agonies; and he was conscious of a pang of fear, feeling himself so young and strong. Presently he led her into St. Ann's Square, and then they shook hands. He hurried off to his business, and she remained standing a moment on the pavement outside the church which makes one side of the square. An impulse seized her--she turned and went into the church instead of going home. There, in one of the old oak pews where the little tarnished plates still set forth the names of their eighteenth-century owners, she fell on her knees and wrestled with herself and God. She was very simple, very ignorant, but religion, as religion can, had dignified and refined all the elements of character. She said to herself in an agony--that he _must_ love her--that she had loved him in truth all along. And then a great remorse came upon her--the spiritual glory she had just passed through closed round her again. What! she could see the heaven opened--the Good Shepherd stoop to take his own--and then come away to feel nothing but this selfish, passionate craving? Oh, she was ashamed, she loathed herself! _Lucy!_--Lucy had no claim! should have no claim! He did not care for her. Then again the pale dead face would flash upon her with its submissive look,--so much gratitude for so little, and such a tender ease in dying! And she possessed by all these bad and jealous feelings, these angry desires, fresh from such a presence! _'Oh! Lamb of God--Lamb of God--that takest away the sins of the world!'_ CHAPTER VI And David, meanwhile, was thinking of nothing in the world but the fortunes of a little shop, about twelve feet square, and of the stall outside that shop. The situation--for a hero--is certainly one of the flattest conceivable. Nevertheless it has to be faced. If, however, one were to say that he had marked none of Lucy Purcell's advances, that would be to deny him eyes as well as susceptibilities. He had, indeed, said to himself in a lordly way that Lucy Purcell was a regular little flirt, and was beginning those ways early. But a certain rough young modesty, joined with a sense of humour at his own expense, prevented him from making any more of it, and he was no sooner in his own den watching for customers than Lucy vanished from his mind altogether. He thought much more of Purcell himself, with much vengeful chuckling and speculation.