own advance. What a life-work for a man! Here might David have spent
his days, here among his own countrymen, instead of in that far-off land
where all the forces of centuries were fighting against him. Here the
forces would have been fighting for him; the trend was towards the
elevation of the standards of living and the wider rights of labour,
to the amelioration of hard conditions of life among the poor. David's
mind, with its equity, its balance, and its fire--what might it not have
accomplished in shepherding such a cause, guiding its activity?

The gate of the garden clicked. Kate Heaver had arrived. Faith got to
her feet and left the room.

A few minutes later the woman of the cross-roads was seated opposite
Faith at the window. She had changed greatly since the day David had
sent her on her way to London and into the unknown. Then there had been
recklessness, something of coarseness, in the fine face. Now it was
strong and quiet, marked by purpose and self-reliance.

Ignorance had been her only peril in the past, as it had been the cause
of her unhappy connection with Jasper Kimber. The atmosphere in which
she was raised had been unmoral; it had not been consciously immoral.
Her temper and her indignation against her man for drinking had been the
means of driving them apart. He would have married her in those days, if
she had given the word, for her will was stronger than his own; but she
had broken from him in an agony of rage and regret and despised love.

She was now, again, as she had been in those first days before she went
with Jasper Kimber; when she was the rose-red angel of the quarters; when
children were lured by the touch of her large, shapely hands; when she
had been counted a great nurse among her neighbours. The old simple