It is wonderful how the touch of the kindly mother earth cleanses the soul from its unwholesome humors.

The hours that Hughie spent in working with the clean, red earth seemed somehow to breathe virtue into him.

He remembered the past months like a bad dream.

They seemed to him a hideous unreality, and he could not think of Foxy and his schemes, nor of his own weakness in yielding to temptation, without a horrible self-loathing.

He became aware of a strange feeling of sympathy and kinship with old Donald Finch.