Master Hardwick lay unwinking, high upon his pillows. Aderhold could not tell how much really entered ear and mind; the old man seemed to be regarding something far away, something growing in the distance. The pity of it, he thought, was for Will and old Dorothy and the boy; they were drinking, drinking. At last Master Clement desisted. He stared with a fixed face at Master Hardwick who stared beyond him. “Thou impenitent old man—!” He rose and with a gesture dismissed the three in line. Will and Dorothy and the boy filed out, primed to discuss among themselves master’s impenitency. “I go now, Master Hardwick,” said the minister, “but I shall come again to-morrow, though I fear me thou art as utterly lost as any man in England!” Aderhold accompanied him from the chamber into the hall. He knew that it was in order to speak with unction of the just closed exhortation; to wonder at the minister’s fervent power, and deprecate with sighs and shaken head the horrible wickedness of the human heart; to marvel that any could hold out against the truth so presented—how many times had he heard such an utterance and seen the self-congratulation behind—how many times! He knew that the pause which the minister made, unconscious as it certainly was, was a pause for the accustomed admiration. When it did not come he saw that, as unconsciously again, Master Clement’s mistrust of him deepened. He knew that, for all his locked lips and eyes withheld from expression, for all his stillness, repression, and church-going, the minister liked him not. The clash of minds came subtly through whatever walls you might build around it. “I fear, Master Aderhold,” now said the minister, “that you have done little during your residence with your kinsman to bring him to repentance. Surely, in these years of such close communion, a godly man could have done much! Such a man as Harry Carthew would have had him by now day and night upon his knees!” Aderhold sighed, then dropped the veil, and raising his head, spoke eye to eye. “I would that I could make you believe, Master Clement, that there is in this old man who is coming to die more good than ill. In these years that you speak of, I have seen that good grow, of its own motion, upon the ill. Why may it not continue, throughout oceans yet of experience, to suffuse and gain upon and dissolve and reconcile unto itself the ill?” Master Clement drew a sharp “Ha!” of triumph. Here was heterodoxy raising its head, and the man had always looked to him heterodox! “Ha! ‘_Of its own motion!_’ Beware—beware, Master Aderhold! I have marked you—I am marking you still! Beware lest one day you be cited for a creeping, insidious doubter and insinuator of false doctrine!”