He gardens at Lampit. They grow freely there. Your silk stockings hung round her neck, a posy of flowers twisted into them.--When I came on this exhibition, I can't quite tell you how I felt. It raised Cain in me to think of that degraded, misbegotten creature pawing over and playing about with anything which had belonged to you. I was for making Sclanders, his father, bring him over and give him the thrashing of his life, right there before the proofs of his sins." "But you didn't," Damaris cried. "You didn't. What do my shoes and stockings matter? I oughtn't to have left them on the shore. It was putting temptation in his way." Faircloth looked at her smiling. "No I didn't, and for two reasons. One that I knew--even then--you would find excuses, plead for mercy, as you have just now. Another, those flowers. If I had found--well--what I might have found, oh! he should have had the stick or the dog-whip without stint. But one doesn't practise devil-worship with flowers. It seemed to me some craving after beauty was there, as if the poor germ of a soul groped out of the darkness towards what is fair and sweet. I dared not hound it back into the darkness, close down any dim aspiration after God it might have. So I left its pitiful joss-house inviolate, the moan of the wind and sighing of the great reed-beds making music for such strange rites of worship as have been, or may be, practised within. Any god is better than none--that's my creed, at least. And to defile any man's god--however trumpery--unless you're amazingly sure you've a better one to offer him in place of it is to sin against the Holy Ghost." Faircloth rose to his feet. "Time's up"--he said. "I must go. Here is farewell to the most beautiful day of my life.--But see, Damaris"-- And he knel
