The two rode some little distance without speaking, then Carthew opened his lips abruptly. “How do you like this country?” “I like it well,” said Aderhold. “It is a fair country.” “Fair and unfair,” answered the other. “It rests like every other region under the primal Curse—The old man, back there, has taken a fancy to you and calls you his kinsman. Do you expect to bide at the Oak Grange?” “I think it truth that I am his kinsman,” answered Aderhold. “For the other—I do not know.” “He is misliked hereabouts,” said Carthew. “He is old and miserly. Those who have goods and gear like him not because he will not spend with them, and those who have none like him not because he gives nothing. The Oak Grange is a ruinous place.” The village now opened before them, a considerable cluster of houses, most of them small and poor, climbing a low hill and spreading over a bit of meadow. The houses were huddled together, but they enclosed a village green and here and there rose old trees, or showed a tiny garden. At the farther end, on the higher ground, the church lifted itself, dominating. Beyond it ran the highway still. The landscape was fair, with hill and dale, and to the right, against the horizon, violet-hued and misty, an old forest. Aderhold looked somewhat wistfully at the scene before him. He had passed through much of harm and peril. Body and mind he wanted rest, quiet routine, for a time some ease. “It looks a place where peace might be found,” he said. “Five years ago,” said Carthew, “we had the sweating sickness. Many died. Then all saw the shadow from the lifted Hand.” “It is wholesome now?” “Aye,” answered the other, “until sin and denial again bring bodily grief.” Aderhold glanced aside at his companion. The latter was riding with a stern and elevated countenance, his lips moving slightly. The physician knew that look no less than he had known the serving-man’s. “Is it not,” demanded Carthew, “is it not marvellous how the whole Creation groaneth and travaileth with the knowledge of her doom! How contemptible and evil is this world! Yet here we are sifted out—and not the wise man of old, nor the heathen, nor the ignorant, nor the child in his cradle is excused! Is it not marvellous how, under our very feet, men and women and babes are burning in hell! How, for Adam’s sin, all perish save only the baptized believer—and he is saved in no wise of his own effort and merit, but only of another’s! How God electeth the very damned—and yet is their guilt no whit the less! Is it not marvellous!” “Aye, fabulously marvellous,” said Aderhold. “The sense of sin!” pursued Carthew. “How it presses hard upon my heart! The sense of sin!” Aderhold was silent. He possessed a vivid enough realization of his many and recurring mistakes and weaknesses, but, in the other’s meaning, he had no sense of sin.