“I’m pledged to the Stuart Cause. You may go, Eli,” he said, with the curtness he mistook for strength. “Ay, you’re pledged, maister. But is it down in black and white? As a plain man o’ business, I tell ye no contract need be kept unless it’s signed and sealed.” “And honour, you old fool?” snapped Underwood, afraid of his own conscience. “Honour? That’s for gentry-folk to play with. You and me, maister, were reared at Rigstones Chapel, where there was no slippery talk o’ that kind. It’s each for his own hand, to rive his way through to the Mercy Throne. It’s a matter o’ business, surely--we just creep and clamber up, knowing we’ve to die one day--and we’ve to keep sharp wits about us, if we’re to best our neighbour at the job. It would be a poor do, I reckon, if ye lost your chance by letting some other body squeeze past ye, and get in just as th’ Gates were shutting, leaving ye behind.” The whole bleak past returned to Will Underwood. He saw, as if it stood before him harsh against the rough hillocks of the moor, the squat face of Rigstones Chapel. He heard again the gospel of self-help, crude, arid, and unwashed, that had thundered about his boyhood’s ears when his father took him to the desolation that was known as Sabbath to the sect that worshipped there. It had been all self-help there, in this world’s business or the next--all a talk of gain and barter--and never, by any chance, a hint of the over-glory that counts sacrifice a pleasant matter, leading to the starry heights. “Eli, I washed my hands of all that years ago,” he said. “Ay, and, later on try to wash ’em of burning brimstone, maister--it sticks, and it burns, does the hell-fire you used to know.” There is something in a man deeper than his own schooling of himself--a something stubborn, not to be denied, that springs from the graves where his forefathers lie. To-night, as he watched Eli’s grim mouth, the clean-shaven upper lip standing out above his stubby beard, as he listened to his talk of brimstone, he was no longer Underwood, debonair and glib of tongue. He was among his own people again--so much among them that he seemed now, not only to see Rigstones Chapel, but to be living the old life once more, in the little house, near the watermill that had earned the beginnings of his grandfather’s riches. Thought by thought, impulse by impulse, he was divided from these folk of later years--the men and women who hunted, dined, and danced, with the single purpose behind it all--the single hope that one day they would be privileged to give up all, on the instant call, for loyalty to the King who reigned in fact, if not in name. To-night, with Eli’s ledger-like, hard face before him, Underwood yielded to the narrower and more barren teaching that had done duty for faith’s discipline at Rigstones Chapel. And yet he would not admit as much. “You’re a sly old sinner, Eli,” he said, with a make-believe of the large, rollicking air which he affected.