With a sudden replenished faith he looked to God, as he recalled the despised, loathsome dead man now lying on the altar of the church--asleep now, across the crimson picture that his, now dead, hand had shaped with the blood of Lem's father. Surely none but God's hand had wrought this retribution. Verily, this Omnipotent Being would not forsake him now? He was now sensible to the God-sent monitor that had saved him from McGill. He was sensible to the Providential agency that saved him from the Judas, Orlick. With praises, he remembered Belle-Ann's escape from this vampire. Surely this self-same God would not deny him now. Lem did not mumble disjointedly now. He did not whisper incoherent, aimless pleas. Now, from the crest of the world, his aching breast heaving, and his erring feet firm upon his ancestral Rock of Ages, he lifted his face up to the trembling stars, as with outstretched, pleading arms he cried out vociferously to God for Him to come to him--called out, in ringing, fulsome words that carried afar, for Him to hasten, lest he perish in the conflict that made blind agony within him. And ere his wet, quivering lips had closed, and while still his eyes were upward, and his two arms imploring Heaven, the two forces that had, like live combatants, met midway of his soul for supremacy, did separate. The white purity of Righteousness had come into his evil heart, and the blackness dropped away and out of his life! And all the old poisonous venom, festering soul sores and gnawing misery ebbed out of the boy's being and left it receptive to the influx of harmony and heart-peace that he saw in Belle-Ann and which he so ardently craved. Panting like a spent man at the end of a long run, Lem now fell down on his knees in his copious gratitude. On his knees, his head on his arm, in a divine lethargy, he rested. With prayerful, oft-said words he pondered vaguely upon this miracle. So engrossed in his felicitude and deep thanksgiving was he that he did not see the gruesome spectacle at his back. Belle-Ann sat upon the witch-elm block and strained her eager eyes upward. Aloft there on Eagle Crown she could see Lem against the moon-laved night. Now she could discern his figure full--now his upper half. Again his head only would make a blot. Moving--always moving. She divined the terrible struggle going on in his breast, in his will to renounce the hurtful creed that heredity had written in his blood, and she realized that the conflict was all for her own sake. She measured the boy's love and honor with ample adoration. He would not come to her with a lie on his lips to disguise the heritage of murder coiled in his heart.