“You are a wicked man, Joseph Dylks,” the woman solemnly answered. “And I'm sorry I asked you anything. You couldn't do good, if you tried.” She pulled her sunbonnet across her face, as if to hide it for shame, and went back slowly toward the cabin.
“Salvation!” Dylks shouted after her, and gave his equine snort. He began to sing, as he took his way through the woods,
“Plunged in a gulf of dark despair
We wretched sinners lay.”
At first he sang boldly, filling the woods with the mocking of his hymn. But at the sound of footsteps crackling over the dry falling twigs toward him intermittently, as if they paused in question, and then resumed their course toward him, his voice fell, brokenly silencing itself till at the encounter of a man glimpsed through the trees, and pausing in a common arrest, it ceased altogether.
“Who are you?” Dylks demanded of the slight, workworn figure before him.
“Laban Billings,” the man faltered.
“Well, then, Laban Billings, make way for the Lord thy God,” Dylks powerfully returned, and as if he had borne the man down before him, he strode over the place where he had stood, and lost himself in the shadows beyond.
Laban hurried on, stumbling and looking back over his shoulder, till he found himself face to face with Nancy at the door of the shed behind the cabin. She was looking, too, in the direction Dylks had ceased from their sight in the woods. They started from each other in mutual fright.
“Nancy!” he entreated. “I didn't see you. I—I wasn't comin' to see you, indeed, indeed I wasn't. I just thought I might ketch sight of the baby—It's pretty hard to do without you both! And I was just passin'—Well, they've knocked off work at the Corners, so's to come to the miracle at Hingston's Mill to-night—But I'll go right away again, Nancy.”
“You needn't, Laban. Come in and see the baby.”