He took one of the little dogs between his knees, a pretty, frisking little creature, thinking nothing of its imminent pain, and, holding one of its fore-paws in his hand, picked up the knife. The puppy whined piteously as the swift scalpel divided the living gristle of its foot, but its brethren frisked about all unheeding. Hyla saw nothing for a time. He seemed thinking. His intelligent eyes were glazed and far away, only the impassive, hairless face remained, with little or no soul to brighten it. And yet a great struggle was surging over this poor man's heart, and such as he had never known before. To his rough and animal life an emotional crisis was new and startling. Something seemed to have suddenly given way in his brain--some membrane which hitherto had separated him from real things. While the little dog struggled and yelped as its bleeding paw was thrust in measurement through the metal ring, a new man was being born. Hyla's sub-conscious brain told him that nothing that had happened before mattered a shred of straw. He had never understood what life might mean for a man till now. An IDEAL was suddenly revealed to him. But to accept that ideal? that was hard indeed. It meant almost certain death and torture for himself. The promptings of self-interest, which spring from our lower nature, and which are pictorially personified into a grim personality, began to flutter and whisper. "Supposing," they said, "that you did this, that you killed Geoffroi for his sins, and to show that the down-trodden and the poor are yet men, and can exact a penalty. How much better would your companions be? Fulke would be lord then, and he is even as his father. Let it go, hold Gruach in your arms--you have that joy, you know. And work is not so bad. They have not beaten you yet; there are sometimes good things to eat and drink, are there not? Mind when you took home a whole mess of goose and garlic from the hall door? Often you snare a rabbit, and the minter is not ill-disposed to you. You are the best of his men; to you it is given to drive the die and hammer the coin, to beat the die into the silver and to burnish it. It is possible--stranger things have happened--that you might even gain freedom, and become a villein. Lewin might speak for you--who knows? These things have happened before. Is it indeed worth while to do this thing?" While these thoughts were racing through Hyla's brain, and he was considering them, a strange thing happened. To the struggling brain of the serf, all unused to any subtle emotion, Nature made a direct æsthetic appeal. In the middle sky a lark began to trill a song so loud and tuneful, so instinct with Freedom, that it seemed a direct message to him. He stared up at the tiny speck from which these heavenly notes were falling down to earth, and his doubts rolled up like a curtain.