But as Lem climbed upward, a withering despair mounted abreast with him, like the shadow cast by evil. By the time he had reached the giddy apex of the cliff, he was staggering amidst the chaos of a battle with himself that was slowly outdoing his soul.

His mind had come, miraculously, to nurture the holy dogma that Belle-Ann had brought back to him. He could see its wonderful sequence plain in Belle-Ann's beautiful face. In her angelic violet eyes he beheld its wholesome, serene pictures. He could hear it, vocal, in the anthem-music of her soft, new speech. Her very sweet, divine presence irradiated its palpable truths. All that was good in him was calling out for her.

But in the under-tide of some indefinable, contending, compelling element he was drifting apart. While his mind opened its portals to all the logic so earnestly tendered and tutored by Belle-Ann, his back-standing, immutable mountain heart fought it off like a destroyer,—repelled its invasion with a titanic force that his willing energies could not subjugate. The tentacles of his father's creed promptly admonished and enmeshed his rebellious heart, protecting its odium, cleaving to its tenancy of "eye for an eye and tooth for a tooth." Which adjuration only lent impetus to an endless cycle of strife and distress, rolling his feverish soul back amidst bones that curse the dead years—that warp the souls of men, and bow down hearts that God made to beat through life upstanding, radiant with harmony and hope and buoyancy.

In the growing vortex of this tumult of mind and heart, Lem stood like one distraught, circling the limits of the table rock, caged by empty space,—scarce knowing that his feet lifted, oblivious to his whereabouts. Through this seething, tangled skein, his thoughts seeped for an instant and fled backward. He viewed the past. He saw only two sodden graves side by side. His beset pilgrim mind then turned toward the future, and groped out into the years to come in a vain quest for succor and some element of honest hope.

The boy's thoughts rushed back upon him with a picture that forbade contemplation—a barren, dismal prospect—a measure of life that did not embrace Belle-Ann. He would choose death, he told himself, rather than gain and mislead her. Even had he sought to, he knew he could not withstand his own lie to her. She whose limpid, steadfast, child-eyes could read every line that crossed his soul—every thought that passed his eyes. He knew a lie would sheathe itself in its own being.

In his extremity, he stalked madly about the confines of this moon-touched mount. His perturbation waxed to a volcanic upheaval that now inflicted a physical pain. To him it was as if these two conflicting forces had confiscated his corporal structure for a ravaging mÊlÉe, augmented by two combative rivals struggling in his own heart. His mad love for Belle-Ann—his blind adherence and faith in the code-honor of his hillman lineage. That there was something amiss in this faith his mind could not deny but, oddly enough, his heart hotly rejected it all, stirring him to mad, reckless action. Belle-Ann filled up the whole of Lem's wild, humble life. Without her the future held no hope. Without hope he wanted to die. His vain effort to dislodge the scourge within his soul, goaded him to maniacal thoughts.

Then, in an unlooked-for instant, an awful wrong shaped itself to a determination. He would hurl his tortured self over the cliff. He told himself that he was not fearful of the fall. In proof thereof, he rushed to the jagged brink of the ledge and looked down into hazy moonlit space and was unafraid.

With a desperate movement he snatched his hat off and cast it down at his feet. His toes inched over the abyss in his aberration. He gathered a long breath. His knees bent to the leap. His heels raised slowly under him; when in this instant a memory dashed upon him, and he straightened and stiffened, electrified.

The thought of Caleb Peevy rived into his muddled, benumbed mind. Caleb Peevy, who had jumped wilfully off Henhawk's Knob into Hellsfork three years since, and had gone to hell, so they said. A check of repugnance swept him as he recalled the lasting scorn and contempt of the mountain folk, and the epithet of coward—coward that followed Peevy past the grave with its two-edged stigma that linked, inseparably, to his memory to-night.

Lem drew back, stung with self-shame. A hope drifted back into his distraught breast. He looked upward into the astral sky for God's guiding star that Maw Lutts had shown to him. All a-quiver, he watched for the flambeau of Belle-Ann's pious prophecy: "Know ye the truth and the truth shall make ye free!" A divine revelation ebbed across his chaotic senses.

With a sudden replenished faith he looked to God, as he recalled the despised, loathsome dead man now lying on the altar of the church—asleep now, across the crimson picture that his, now dead, hand had shaped with the blood of Lem's father. Surely none but God's hand had wrought this retribution. Verily, this Omnipotent Being would not forsake him now?

He was now sensible to the God-sent monitor that had saved him from McGill. He was sensible to the Providential agency that saved him from the Judas, Orlick.

With praises, he remembered Belle-Ann's escape from this vampire. Surely this self-same God would not deny him now. Lem did not mumble disjointedly now. He did not whisper incoherent, aimless pleas.

Now, from the crest of the world, his aching breast heaving, and his erring feet firm upon his ancestral Rock of Ages, he lifted his face up to the trembling stars, as with outstretched, pleading arms he cried out vociferously to God for Him to come to him—called out, in ringing, fulsome words that carried afar, for Him to hasten, lest he perish in the conflict that made blind agony within him.

And ere his wet, quivering lips had closed, and while still his eyes were upward, and his two arms imploring Heaven, the two forces that had, like live combatants, met midway of his soul for supremacy, did separate.

The white purity of Righteousness had come into his evil heart, and the blackness dropped away and out of his life! And all the old poisonous venom, festering soul sores and gnawing misery ebbed out of the boy's being and left it receptive to the influx of harmony and heart-peace that he saw in Belle-Ann and which he so ardently craved.

Panting like a spent man at the end of a long run, Lem now fell down on his knees in his copious gratitude.

On his knees, his head on his arm, in a divine lethargy, he rested. With prayerful, oft-said words he pondered vaguely upon this miracle. So engrossed in his felicitude and deep thanksgiving was he that he did not see the gruesome spectacle at his back.

Belle-Ann sat upon the witch-elm block and strained her eager eyes upward. Aloft there on Eagle Crown she could see Lem against the moon-laved night. Now she could discern his figure full—now his upper half. Again his head only would make a blot. Moving—always moving. She divined the terrible struggle going on in his breast, in his will to renounce the hurtful creed that heredity had written in his blood, and she realized that the conflict was all for her own sake. She measured the boy's love and honor with ample adoration. He would not come to her with a lie on his lips to disguise the heritage of murder coiled in his heart.

As Belle-Ann waited and watched tensely, a pulsing anxiety swept her heart, like recurring waves gale-driven. Suddenly she leaped with a bound from the witch-elm block, her eyes full of a startling picture. The moon on the descent had caught Eagle Crown rock in its mystic grip, holding it out like a mighty bauble adorning the breast of the mountain.

Lem's full figure, framed within the moon's disk, was etched in magical proportions, like the portrayal of a powerful night glass.

Enraptured, she looked and saw Lem on the brink of the cliff, seemingly so near that she instinctively stretched out a hand to attract him. As she looked she saw him stretch his two arms outward and upward, and she understood their pantomimic plea.

The next instant the sound of his voice, faintly audible, reached her ear. She heard his inarticulate utterance, as with a fervent cry he called out to God, from his dire distraught heart.

Belle-Ann's white bosom heaved and caught a sob of salient joy as she darted up the trail toward Eagle Crown. She would fly to his side now. Lem needed her now. He needed her, who was a part of his life, there to succor him in this the blackest bereft hour of his existence. She knew that God had heard his abandoned supplications. She knew that God was reaching down to him a staff of righteous strength. She would hurry to his side, with the re-enforcement of her own great love while God was there helping him.

Belle-Ann darted to the rock-runged ladder that led the jagged, perilous way up to Eagle Crown. She climbed and climbed and climbed. Many times did she pause for breath. Then she climbed again and turned and twisted and clung on and pulled herself upward, always upward, insensible to fatigue. At last her eyes reached the level of the great jutting boulder and her gaze fell off into moonlit space. She drew her lithe self up and, half turning, beheld Lem's recumbent form bowed down beside a dun indenture in the table rock. He was unconscious of her presence. There was pathos in his crouching, still form.

There was dazed, mute ecstasy in the dark violet of Belle-Ann's eyes which never lifted from this penitent figure. She stood, to still her pounding heart, and waited for him to feel her nearness, or turn his face to her. The satin lustre of her curls was moist and her bosom lifted, palpitating with the advent of the new, great joyous thing that stood upon the threshold of her life to enter and spread its felicity and untold bliss.

All oblivious, Lem was kneeling amidst this new-found grace, and the quiet of a peace that cometh only to the righteous. Belle-Ann had suffered its pangs. She had reaped its peace. She knew the pathology of the pestilent revenge-sore that blights the lives of men. And she experienced all that Lem felt.

With her eyes still upon him, Belle-Ann took one quick, short step forward. She spoke his name, low and soft and vibrant with adoration.

As though he expected her, he looked up, smiling and tranquil, and his every radiant feature told of the triumph that compassed his renovated soul, purged now and wholly clean of its vindictive lust.

His apostasy was full and complete. He rose up strong now and bigger and taller than she had noted an hour since. And there was plain in his face at that instant a certain nobility and greatness.

He stretched his eager, long arms out to her.

"I'll let yo' lead me,—I'll let yo' lead me now, Belle-Ann!" he cried out, his happy eyes aglow with emotion and untold, deathless love.

She tossed the curls back from her lovely be-dimpled features, all aflush now. With a finger upon her bowed lips she answered:

"Kiss me heah—Lem," and walked into his waiting arms.