stretching was the most complete rest he could have. The whole of him, from the top of a sort of skull-cap to his boots, was black, with the exception of his eyes with their pupils of dull brown and large yellowish whites; with the exception, also, of a slight redness at his finger-nails, and the redness of half his lips where his breath had moistened them. These were well formed, as indeed were all his features; but there was on them a repose almost startling. It was not the repose of a face denoting inward peace, it was the repose of stone. It was a face that reminded one of the front of a house that, from some whim of its inmates, has ceased to be used as a front. If Israel's thoughts might be called the inmates of his face, they certainly seldom indeed (if ever) appeared there. They led a hidden life. Their results might be known in the outer world sometimes, but they themselves were invisible; none saw their coming or their going. The very dulness of his opaque brown eyes was the dulness of eyes that chose to be dull; to wear a blind of impassiveness, almost stupor, through which their owner might, unsuspected, study any face he liked as closely as he liked.

The Overman's figure was, perhaps, even more remarkable than his face. It was rather above the middle height; and though scant of flesh, had no visible angle anywhere about it, but a kind of hard roundness from head to foot. Perhaps his clothes, made to suit his own notions of utility and comfort, helped to this effect. Certainly Israel Mort had less the appearance of a man of flesh, bone, and blood than he had of an iron worm; round, lithe, and living; and made to work, and eat, and writhe its way through the stony and carboniferous fastnesses of the earth. He looked, in fact, a diver-born, ready armed and breathed, to dive again and yet again into that underground, waveless sea of death.

As David looked at his father, questioning with his wide, timorous blue eyes, Israel let the clasp of his hands at the back of his neck snap; and stretching one towards David, laid it on his head, and looked at him steadily with those dull, impassive orbs of his.

David's breath quickened, so did the beating of his heart. His mother looked on.

It was several years since the Overman had taken so much notice of his useless son.

"Why, we shall be getting too strong, next,' said he, in the loud deep tone of one accustomed to hear his voice muffled and dulled by narrow walls and low roof.

He is flushed,' said Mrs. Mort. Come to your tea, David.'

6

Flushed!' echoed Israel, drawing his hand over both cheeks. Cool as a cucumber!' he added, with a slight smile, as he turned from the boy, and went to wash his face and hands.

He had no sooner left the room than David's eyes sought his mother's. He found them fixed upon him sorrowfully, passionately; but no sooner did they encounter his than they turned away again.

David crossed to where his mother stood busying herself with some things on the top of an old bureau. He touched her elbow.

'Mother!'

Mrs. Mort looked round, not at David, but over him towards the door by which Israel had gone out and would presently return.

There was a great resemblance between these two, though David was a picture of health and grace without blemish, and Mrs. Mort was wan and angular. David, too, though blue-eyed, was much darker than his mother, whose fairness had now blanched into a dull, faint colour, which possessed eyes, lips, cheeks, and hair. The thing which made them so alike was the long-endured, neverabsent dread, the unmentioned haunting fear that both shared.

'Mother!' said David again, in a more rousing and comforting voice.

'Go to your tea, David,' Mrs. Mort said sharply, pushing him by the shoulder; and glancing up, David saw his father coming into the room, and looking straight at them with perfectly expressionless eyes.

While they were at tea, David and his mother experienced a moment or two of the greatest relief and peace they had ever known. Israel began to talk of his employer, Mr. Jehoshaphat Williams, and his illness, of the quarrels about his case between the Brynnant medical man and the doctor who attends the people of the mine. While he was speaking David asked himself if he might not be as wrong and unreasonable in his suspicions this time as he had been so many, many times before. But he remembered his mother's anxious, timorous manner. What had she heard to have looked as she did when he came in?

Then he wondered might it not be that after all she had taken her fears from his own face when his father had so startled him? He looked at her, trying to express his feeling that their dread had been groundless. The wan face lightens suddenly.

David was assured. It was after all, he felt again, only his own cowardly fancy. His mother would have feared nothing if it had not been for his fear.

He had come home with rather a better appetite than even school, bird-nesting, and the March wind might be supposed to impart. This had vanished completely at Israel's unusual attentions, but now it returned again in full strength. There is no telling how long he might have gone on hacking at the quartern loaf with his vigorous little clasp-knife, disregarding utterly his mother's looks of hesitating remonstrance, if he had not suddenly become aware of his father's eyes being fixed upon him. Israel nodded.

'Eat away,' said he: 'to work like a man, one must eat like a man.'

The little clasp-knife fell; the great slice it had just cut lay across David's plate untouched.

He looked again at his mother, but her colourless eyelashes were down as if glued to her pale cheek.

Israel turned to her and said carelessly—

Mary, just bring that bundle I brought in; it's on David's bed.'

She rose and left the room.

While she was gone,

David sat without raising his eyes, and fully conscious that his father was watching him.

When Mrs. Mort returned, David rose at the sight of her. She had nothing in her hands, but her lips were almost blue, and she seemed scarcely able to drag one foot after the other as she went to Israel's chair.

She laid both her hands upon his shoulder, and, bend-. ing down, whispered something that David did not hear. His father, however, noticed her words in no other way than turning to look at her, and saying in his Overman's voice

'I asked you to bring them here, Mary.'

She went again and came back with something in her arms. David saw directly what this was-a suit of mining clothes made of a size to fit him.

She went up to Israel with them, but instead of letting him take them when he stretched out his hand, she held them so tightly as she looked at him, that he was obliged to rise and drag them gently but firmly from her.

'Now David, my man,' said he, throwing them at the boy's feet, put those on.'

6

"Father!' cried David. 'Mother! what are they for? Oh! you don't mean, father-'

Put them on!' commanded the Overman, in a certain peculiar tone of his that was very rarely disobeyed. 'Obedience first, David; questions afterwards.'

In two or three minutes Israel was contemplating, with grim satisfaction, what seemed to him a small but promising imitation of himself.

One thing annoyed his eye as he surveyed him.

'Mary,' he said, turning to his wife, 'give me a pair of scissors we must have nothing straggling and ready to catch at things; this hair might be in the way.'

By this time, however, Mrs. Mort was perfectly useless. She had fallen into a chair, and sat watching them like one spell-bound.

David felt that, unfit as he was to speak, the moment for his appeal had come. He would make one desperate attempt to touch his father's heart; he would tell him

all his hopes, his little plans of how he might be a man by other means than this.

When Israel took the scissors from the bureau and began to cut his hair, the boy considered that perhaps it would be as well to wait till he had finished, lest it should seem this trivial act had anything to do with his emotion and resistance.

All at once, while he was wondering how nearly his father had finished his novel task, David had a leather cap drawn firmly down over his head, and felt himself approaching the door in a grasp of iron.

Two simultaneous cries, expressing all the fears that had tortured two hearts for years, were heard from end to end of the rows of miners' cottages known as Pekin.

6

Some of the neighbours running out from their doors to learn what that shriek of Israel!' and 'Father!' meant, saw the Overman's figure, with a smaller one beside it, passing swiftly in the twilight.

Two women whispered together-and hurried to the Overman's cottage.

Opening the door and looking in, they saw by the firelight a woman sitting on the floor, looking wildly at a little heap of light hair beside her.

Seeing them, she lifted her eyes and arms, crying

out

6

Yes, it has come at last! Oh! God, have mercyhave mercy upon him!'

CHAPTER II.

SHOWING HOW AN ANGEL APPEARED TO DAVID.

THE way to the mine was, for a short time, through a wood, which was in parts so dense as to create an artificial darkness.

Somehow David felt that this darkness was necessary