angered God, to save him not from hell-fire and to be yourself whelmed, remediless, for eternity! Few there were who could inwardly frame the question, “Is He angered?” or “What is He that can be so angered?” or “You who would silence this man with the silence of death, are you beyond doubt the spokesmen of God and Eternity? Are you, after all, _God’s_ Executioners?” But they said that they were, and the human mind was clay to believe.... Aderhold looked over the church and thought he saw none who would not be terrified aside. Well! he asked those questions and other questions. Mind and moral nature rose in him and stood. But he knew that his body would betray him if it could. Highly strung, very sensitive to pain, he possessed an imagination and memory vivid to paint or to bring back all manner of pangs and shrinkings of the earthly frame. No detail of any Calvary but in some wise he knew and feared it. He felt the cold sweat dew his temples and break out upon the backs of his hands. He felt the nausea that numbed and withered the brain and brought the longing for death.... Not in the beginning, the middle, or the ending of his white-heated discourse did the minister call the name of Gilbert Aderhold or say the Oak Grange. The invective, the “Lo, this is he that troubleth Israel!” only drew in circles, closer, closer, until there was no one there who did not know who was meant. The tremendous accusation was of Atheism, but in and out there tolled like a lesser bell, _Sorcery! Sorcery!_ The withdrawing light, the hot, small, vagrant breaths of air, announcers of the onward rolling storm, the darkened hollow of the building with the whitewashed walls glimmering pale, the faces lifted from the benches, the square Hall pew, the high pulpit and the black sounding-board and the black figure with the lifted arms and the death-like shaken hands, and in the back of the church, all knew, even if they could not see him, the man who had made pact with the Devil.... A woman fainted; a child began a frightened, whimpering crying. The sands had quite run out from the upper half of the hourglass....