Helen was seated at a big plain deal table in the village Room with a large array of volumes in hospital spread in front of her. Some wanted covers,—the cover peculiar to the books in the library of the Room was brown holland of a strangely discouraging hue, stitched over the back and sides, and turned down inside; others wanted stamp-paper over torn edges, and most wanted labels, bearing the title, gummed on to their backs. True, the very magnitude of the repairs needed was evidence that the library was at any rate appreciated by the parishioners, but the thought that her nimble hands were employed on a useful work did not at the present moment succeed in consoling her for the extremely distasteful nature of the occupation. Dispiriting, too, were her surroundings. On the walls hung the hateful maps of Hampshire and the Holy Land, scientific diagrams of the construction of flowers, and several charts of geological strata, shewing old sandstone, new sandstone, blue lias in which diamonds occur, and yellow bands of auriferous reef. A large, black, cast-iron stove stood in one corner, a bagatelle-board with torn cloth and tipless cues—these, too, would have to be mended after the library—occupied another table, and standing against the wall were low deal bookcases. The floor was covered with an affair of oil-cloth pattern and of corky texture, so indestructible as to be practically eternal, and a harmonium, happily not at all eternal but in advanced senile decay of cypher and dumb-notes and strange noises like a death-rattle, stood near the door. In spite of the wide-open windows, the characteristic smell of the Room hung heavy and stale on the air in this oppressive heat of an August day.

Helen had been back from London some three weeks, but in spite of her endeavours to settle down again into the village life, she had not been very successful in doing so. Duties which before had seemed tolerable enough had become frightfully tedious, while those which before had seemed tedious had become intolerable. Only the evening before her father had spoken to her about her general behaviour À propos of what he called the “falling-off” of the village choir. This meant that on the previous Sunday the organist had played one tune and the choir had sung another, which had displeased his unmusical ear, though Martin, who had been home from Cambridge for the Sunday, had listened with rapt attention, and said to Helen that he thought it extremely Wagnerian. This opinion, it may be remarked, he had not expressed to his father.

“I am afraid your pleasure-trip to London has unsettled you, Helen,” her father had said, “and you should really take yourself in hand, and make up your mind to recapture your habits of industry again. One is often disposed to be impatient with what one calls ‘little duties,’ but, dear girl, there is no such thing as a little duty. There is no such scale possible; duty is duty, and it is all great; and your eager and willing performance of all those things which may seem to you small is just as much a part of real life as to the emperor the discharge of the cares of his empire. For instance, the hymn at the morning service on Sunday——“

“But it isn’t my fault if Mr. Milton plays the wrong hymn,” said Helen.

“But it ought to be impossible that such accidents should occur,” said her father. “You should think, dear Helen, in Whose Honour it is that we stand up to sing in church, and that knowledge constantly with you, you will find must elevate the smallest duty and raise the most insignificant piece of work into an act of praise and worship.”

“I will try, father,” said she.

“I know you will. Your holiday, all the mirth and innocent pleasure you have had in London, ought to help you to it. Those times of refreshment are given us not to make us discontented with our work, but to enable us to bring to it a rested and more active industry.”

But this morning it seemed to have brought to Helen nothing of the kind, but only a rested and more active doubt as to whether any of the things that filled her day could possibly, in the doing, be good for her, or when done for others. The “Sunday Magazine,” for instance, of which at this moment she was pasting the torn pages, seemed to her to be singularly ill adapted to do anything for anybody. There was an essay on the habits of mice, another on the temptations of engine-drivers; answers to correspondents dealt with lotions for the hair and the best treatment for burns; while in the forefront of each number was an instalment of a serial story connected with incredible ranches and mining in California. But, in spite of her conscientious doubts, her fingers moved apace, and the stack of healed and mended volumes at her right hand grew quickly tall.

She worked on till about twelve without pause, and then pushed back her chair and began carrying the mended volumes to their shelves. If only she could have entertained any hopes as to the utility of what she was doing she would have accepted her occupation with cheerfulness, for her nature was one of that practical kind which finds almost any pursuit, so long as it has definite and profitable aim, congenial. This afternoon again she would have to take choir-practice in the Room, and even with the eager desire to find “good in everything” she could not see who profited by the cacophonous result. And to add to her labours, the ill-inspired ambitions of Mr. Milton had caused him to learn with infinite pains and groanings of the organ in evening hours nothing less than an anthem for the Harvest Festival, and it remained for her to teach the choir. Hours would go to the repetition of it before that unmelodious festival; and even if it had been possible that relentless practice could make the choir tolerably secure of their notes (which it could not), yet the result, even if it were faultlessly performed, would be deplorable, since it was an anthem of that peculiarly depressing kind produced by minor organists, contained a fugal passage which was not a fugue, and, musically speaking, was of the most suburban and jerry-built construction.

Helen pushed back her hair, and, slightly amused at the greyness of her own thoughts, smiled to herself as she went backward and forward between table and bookcase. If only she had some one, another sister, to share in these farthing woes of a rector’s daughter, she could have laughed at them; she and a friend, at any rate, could have read each other striking extracts from the mended leaves of the “Sunday Magazine.” Then suddenly she heard a step on the gravel outside, a step not her father’s, but strangely familiar, and the door opened.

“Why, Lord Yorkshire,” she said. “How delightful! Do come in.”

Frank had the enviable faculty of keeping comparatively cool on very hot days, just as on occasions heating and stirring to the spirit his nature seldom boiled. But to-day he was much hotter spiritually than physically, and Helen’s genuine pleasure to see him, which shone in her eyes and her smile and vibrated in her voice, did not reduce this genial heat.

“I have not done wrong,” he asked, “to come and interrupt you? They told me at the vicarage that you were here.”

“No, indeed, you have not,” said she, shaking hands. “Really, I was longing for an interruption. Look!” and she pointed to the titles of her mended stack of books.

He glanced at them with a smile.

“Really, without undue conceit, I don’t wonder,” he said. “And so this is the Room you told me about in London?”

His eyes wandered round, looking at the maps and the colored chart of geological formation, at the harmonium, the bagatelle-board. Then suddenly all the girl’s loyalty to her father rose in her.

“Ah, don’t laugh,” she said. “I can’t bear that you should laugh.”

He looked at her quite gravely.

“Heaven forbid,” he said. “Here, as in that map of geological strata, there is an auriferous reef. There is to be found a little belt of gold in everything which we may have to do, as long as it is not—not nasty. The trouble sometimes is to find it. Haven’t you struck it this morning?”

Helen sat down with a little sigh.

“No. Help me to dig a little,” she said. “Look at the soil! ‘Sunday Magazine.’ A serial. Then ‘Round the tea-table,’ with a receipt for muffins. ‘Muffins’ is torn. I must mend it. Missionary work among the aborigines of Somaliland. Oh, dear! What has it all got to do with me—this me?” she cried.

“Perhaps you have not yet mended enough to find out,” he suggested.

“That is possible. All the same I have mended a good deal. Now I am going to talk ‘Lady Sunningdale’ for two minutes; at least there are fifty distinct and separate things I want to say in one breath. First of all, please smoke; the Room smells of Sunday-school. Yes, and give me one,—if my father appears suddenly you must say it was you. Next, I suppose you have come from Fareham. How is Lady Sunningdale? And you’ll stop for lunch, of course. Next, Martin. He is going to leave Cambridge at the end of the long. He is going to settle in London in the autumn and study under Monsieur Rusoff. Oh, why wasn’t I born a boy? I suppose you can’t tell me. So once again about Martin, thanks. What a good time we had in London! I have never enjoyed a fortnight more. Is every one as kind as that always?”

“I think they always will be to you,” said he. “You two took London by storm. We all went into mourning and retirement into the country when you left.”

Helen laughed.

“You don’t look as if any grief particularly weighed on you,” she said.

“Clearly not now,” said he.

This was a little clumsily obvious, and it made her for the moment slightly embarrassed. She dabbed a label somewhat crooked on to the back of a work about missionary enterprise.

“Can you write a legible hand, Lord Yorkshire?” she said. “If so, and if you will be kind enough, please write ‘Sunday Magazine’ very clearly on twelve labels, with ordinal numbers, one to twelve, below the title. And when I’ve pasted them on, I shall have finished, and we’ll go out. Martin isn’t here, I am afraid. He is up at Cambridge till the end of the month.”

Frank obediently took a pen. He had suffered a slight repulse.

“A notable charm of life,” he remarked, “is its extreme unexpectedness. If I had been told by a chiromantist that I should shortly be writing the words ‘Sunday Magazine’—is that legible enough?—twelve times over with numerals beneath I should have distrusted everything else he said. Yet, here we go.”

Helen laughed. She was not quite certain whether she was pleased or not at the success with which she had turned the conversation on to topics so alien from herself as the “Sunday Magazine.”

“Quite so,” she said. “And if I had been told that I should be telling you to do so, I should have considered it too wildly improbable to be even funny. Yet, as you say, here we go. Oh!”

Her ear had caught the sound of a step outside, and with a quick sweep of her arm she threw her cigarette out of the window.

“It’s you, remember,” she said, with whispered emphasis.

Frank’s cigarette, however, was still unlit, but he obligingly remedied this, and hurriedly blew out a cloud of smoke and silent laughter. Next moment the vicar entered. He paused for a second on the threshold, his nostrils surprised by this unusual aroma in the Room, but Frank instantly rose.

“How are you, Mr. Challoner?” he said. “I called at the vicarage, but every one was out. But hopes were held out to me that I might find some of you here, so I came. And behold me,” he added, rather felicitously, “a lay helper,” and he pointed to his half-written labels.

The vicar’s somewhat grim face relaxed. There was a neatness about Frank’s speech which his classical tastes approved.

“It is too kind of you, Lord Yorkshire,” he said. “Helen has impressed you into the service, I suppose. But—I am sure you will excuse me—would you mind finishing your cigarette outside? Our rules about smoking in the Room are stringent. You will excuse me.”

His eye glanced rather sternly, as he spoke, at Helen. This was one of the laxities he deplored in his children. She knew quite well that smoking was not allowed in the Room. The most infinitesimal moral courage on her part could have stopped it. And he himself knew how she would excuse herself, saying that she did not think it mattered in the morning when there was no one there. It was a rule of the place, however. He had made it; she knew it.

Frank instantly threw his cigarette out of the window.

“I am so sorry,” he said, “and I am afraid I never asked leave.”

“You have no idea what difficulties we have with even quite the small boys of the village,” continued Mr. Challoner. “Children of eight and nine think it manly to pull at an inch of bad tobacco. So I am sure you will not even mentally accuse me of faddiness. I gave up smoking myself entirely for that reason. You are too kind to help my daughter. You will lunch with us, of course.”

“Thanks, very much. I came over in the motor from Fareham, and Miss Helen had already been so good as to suggest——“

“Of course Martin is away from home, I am sorry to say. Helen has no doubt told you what has been decided.”

He glanced again at her as her quick, nimble fingers plied the work which an hour ago had seemed so distasteful. Certainly now there was in her no trace of that listlessness and want of application and vitality that a few days before had occasioned his loving rebukes. She was all vivid and alert; the fresh, bright colour shone like a sunlit banner in her cheeks, and, as he looked, he realised for the first time this was no longer “my little girl,” but a woman in her own right. Then like an echo to this came the thought that he was not the proprietor of his children. Adviser, corrector, pruner, cultivator he might be, but he could not make nor stop growth if “my little girl” decided otherwise.

This was something of a shock, though only momentary, and there was no perceptible pause before he spoke again.

“So you will bring Lord Yorkshire home to lunch, Helen,” he said. “I must go on to the village. I only looked in on my way. Half-past one, Lord Yorkshire. And afterwards you must try a cigar that I can give you. A year ago they wanted keeping, and now they have got it.”

For a little while after he had left neither spoke. A label had been put on crookedly and required readjustment; something else also had gone crookedly, and Helen had to readjust that, too.

“I’m afraid I must tell him I had been smoking,” she said. “Oh, dear, what a bore!”

“Is not that too transcendental honesty?” he said.

Her eyes flashed their wide light into his.

“Ah, no; there is neither less nor greater in honesty,” she said. “It is a great bore to be honest. I wish I wasn’t. No, I don’t wish that. It is one of the uncomfortable things which one can’t get on without.”

Suddenly he knew that a moment which for weeks had been approaching slowly rushed into the immediate future. He sat upright in his chair and quite unconsciously moved it nearer hers. His upper teeth closed on his lower lip, dragging it upward till it was white. Some mad current of blood sang in his ears, some sudden mistiness obscured his eyes, and she was but a dim, wavering form close to him.

“Honesty! honesty!” he said. “Helen!”

A long-drawn breath rose in her bosom, filling it, filling her, filling everything. A “Sunday Magazine” dropped from her hand, and she stood up. He too stood, and they faced each other for a long moment, and the new certainty became the only certainty there was.

“Oh, are you sure, are you sure?” she cried.

And there was no more need of words just then.

“Since you took the hare out of the trap,” she said. “I think I loved you for that.”

“Since you caught my finger in the trap——“

“And it bled,” said she.

“But you bound it up for me.”

She raised her face and held him by the shoulders, arms outstretched.

“And I remember saying to Martin that this was the sort of room in which nothing nice could happen. Oh, Frank, how has it happened? How has it happened?” she said.

“I don’t know how, my darling, but I know why.”

“Why, then?”

“Because it had to happen as far as I was concerned. Because it was you, in fact. How could it have been otherwise?”

Her eyes dropped a moment, and then looked full at him again.

“Is it real?” she asked. “And if it hadn’t happened, what would have become of us? Supposing you had not said ‘Helen’?”

“What else could I have said?”

“You might have said nothing.”

“Nothing? You and I here together, and nothing? I had been saying nothing too long,” he cried.

“No, not too long. It has all been perfect. And—and the ‘Sunday Magazine,’ and—and twelve labels, each with their numbers. Oh, I surrender,” she said.

“When you have utterly conquered?”

“Yes, both. And both of us.”

“There is only one.”

It was no descent to return to the unfinished work; the business of label-pasting rather was illuminated and made glorious, the putting of the books back in the shelves was a procession of love. Then came the return to the vicarage under the benediction of the sun and the intrusion of the presence of others; but as some telegraph from lover to lover throbs across hundreds of miles of arid and desert country that does not know what secret and blissful tenderness has passed over it, so from each to the other passed unnoticed glances that sent the electric current to and fro, and the words of common life were to them a cypher charged with intimate meaning.

It had been settled between the two that her father should be told at once, and accordingly, after lunch, when he went into his study to get Frank the promised cigar, with a view to coffee on the shady croquet-lawn, the latter followed him, while the two ladies went out, and told him.

“It is the happiest day of my life, Mr. Challoner,” he said, very simply. “Your daughter has accepted my devotion and love.”

Mr. Challoner turned to him quickly.

“Helen?” he said. “You? Lord Yorkshire, this is most unexpected. But I am charmed, delighted, at your news. And I risk the imputation of a father’s partiality when I say that I congratulate you most heartily.”

He shook hands warmly with the young man, and an emotion, very deep and heart-felt, vibrated in his voice.

“May the blessings of God be on you both,” he said.

For a single moment Frank felt as if the thermometer had dropped suddenly, but the sensation was so instantaneous that before he could analyze it it had passed, and Mr. Challoner still held his hand in his strong, firm grasp.

“And I think, I believe, she is a very fortunate girl,” he added. “When—when did you speak to her?”

“This morning only. We settled to tell you at once.”

“Thank you. That was right of you. How the years pass; why it seems only yesterday—— Well, well,—let us join them outside. Ah, a cigar for you. I declare I had forgotten.”

They crossed the lawn together, and as they approached the group of chairs underneath the box-hedge, Mr. Challoner quickened his step a little and advanced to Helen with hands outstretched.

“Helen, my dearest girl,” he said.

The glorified hours of the golden afternoon passed too quickly. Parish work soon claimed the vicar, who, as he passed through the village, gave notice in the school that the choir-practice was postponed till the next day; Aunt Clara betook herself to district-visiting, and the two were left alone again while the shadows began to grow tall on the grass. Sweet words and sweeter silence sang duets together, and from talk and silence they learned each other. For their falling in love had been an instinctive inevitable thing, and now that the gracious deed was accomplished, they explored each other’s nature in the excellent brightness of the love-light.

“Lazy, frightfully lazy,” said he. “Will you take that in hand for me? With the unaccountable delusion, by the way, that I am extremely hard-worked. I lie in bed in the morning, and groan at the thought of all that I shall have to do before I go to bed again. After a very long time I get up—and don’t do it. Helen, how could you have been in the world all these years and I not know it?”

“Oh, what does it matter now? For here we are, and for all the rest of the years we shall both know it. Yes, you shall get up at seven every morning. I will wake you myself.”

“That will be nice. And I needn’t get up at once? And what am I to do when I do get up?”

“Why, all the things you lie groaning about,” she said.

“But there aren’t any, really. At least nothing to groan about.”

“Now you’re talking nonsense. I don’t mind, though. You talked a good deal of nonsense on that Sunday, the hare-Sunday, you and Lady Sunningdale. How is she?”

“I forget. I forget everything but—this!”

She bent towards him.

“Am I really all that to you?” she asked.

“Yes, all. More than all.”

After a while she spoke again.

“And you have no back-thought? There is no dark place at all, no shadow of any kind?”

He looked up quickly.

“Yes, a possible shadow,” he said.

“Religion?”

“Yes; it had occurred to you, too, then. What do you expect?”

Helen sat with her chin resting on her hand a moment without replying.

“I don’t know,” she said, at length. “Don’t let us think about it just now, Frank. Let this afternoon be perfect. But I can tell you this, that though it may possibly be very painful, it will make no difference to me. I shall be very sorry—very, very sorry, but—— That ‘but’ is you, if you understand.”

“Thank you, my darling,” said he.

Mr. Challoner carried a very thankful heart with him as he went on his various errands that afternoon. To see Helen happily married was a constant desire and prayer of his, and though he would with willingness and thankfulness have given her to the keeping of any good man who could support her and a family, he did not attempt to disguise from himself the satisfaction he felt at her having made what is vulgarly called “a great match.” She had the gifts which should enable her to fill a great position, and to play a great part worthily was a bigger and a finer thing,—though he had said “duty was duty and there is neither less nor greater” than to work on a smaller scale. More than that, he had, with all his personal unworldliness, a good deal of pride of race, which Frank with his undeniable birth and breeding gratified. For the man himself, also, he felt a very decided liking and respect; he was an admirable landlord, in spite of his avowed laziness; he was generally considered to get through the day’s work with credit. In the House of Lords, also, he had already achieved a certain reputation for eminent common sense; and though to advocates of extremes his speeches might appear commonplace, that was rather the fault of those who held an extreme view. In other words, he lent his wealth and position to the support of moderation, much as Lord Flintshire had done.

Another matter dearer to Mr. Challoner’s heart than the obscurities of fiscal affairs was that Frank was, if not a pillar, at any rate a very sound piece of the fabric in the twin-towered building called “Church and State.” His patronage was always given to clergy of moderate views who did not indulge in what Mr. Challoner called “idolatrous and Romish practices,” while, on the other hand, he always voted dead against any attempt to subtract from the power or position of the English Church as by law established. “A staunch Churchman,” said Mr. Challoner to himself, as he walked with his long, rapid strides through the pathway hedged about with the yellowing corn.

For the time his disappointments about Martin were forgotten. There, it is true, his dreams about his boy’s future had been dispelled by a rude and bitter awakening, but here, at any rate, was something which he had never dreamed being realised, and without overestimating the force and value of education and the influences which spring from environment and mode of life, he believed that Helen would assuredly live her mature and wider life on the lines in which she had been brought up. So in this marriage he saw a strong weapon forged of steel and wielded by a loyal hand in defence of his mistress the Church. He knew well the immense power which in England a territorial magnate is possessed of; how by the mere fact of his wealth and position he can control the course of wide issues. Hitherto Frank had done just that; he had always ranged himself on the side of education and religion, or rather he had ranged the inert weight of all he represented there, while he himself had keenly pursued the artistic things of life. But now Helen, with all the influence of her home and upbringing strong within her, would come to add life to this solid weight, making it an active and potent instead of a passive instrument of good. He almost envied the girl,—such opportunity was given to few only, and on her would the responsibility and the glory rest.

His district-visiting that afternoon had taken him into the farthest limits of his parish, and a three-mile walk into the glories of the sunset lay before him when he turned homewards. A flush of colour, vivid and delicate as the cheek of youth, incarnadined the west, over which a few light fleeces of crimson cloud hung like flames, and further up from the horizon a belt of aqueous green melted into the transparent blue of the sky overhead. The sun had already sunk behind the tawny line of swelling down, and the water-meadows by the Itchen, where his path lay, were full of dusky and deepening shadows. Right down the centre ran the lucent stream, reflecting on its surface the blue and the green and the flush of the sunset sky. Rooks cawed their way homeward to where the elms of Chartries showed black against the luminous west, and to the left of the long gabled faÇade of house-roof rose the grey gothic tower of his church, the lodestar of his life, the mistress of his heart. That was the realest thing in all the world to him; all that was beautiful at this magic hour in earth and sky was but a path that conducted his soul thither; all that he loved on earth was only the shadow and faint similitude of the great love of his which centred there. Nothing had any real existence except in its relation to that; everything else was but an avenue to an anti-chamber in the house of many mansions. And as his eye first caught sight of the grey, cross-surmounted tower, he stopped a moment, uncovered his head, and with closed eyes stood still in a Presence more poignantly there with him than any. Through his impatience with ways and methods not his own, through his intolerance of that of which he had no ability of comprehension, through his instinctive dismissal of all that seemed to him unessential in life, whether it was the benediction of the evening hour, the piano-playing of Martin, the sweet eyes of Helen, through all, at moments like these, when his human emotions were most aroused, his view pierced triumphant and saw only the cross of Christ pointing heavenward. Towards that, and that alone, the essential nature of the man was directed, even as the compass-needle, though deflected and distracted by other neighbouring agencies, is essentially undeviating and loyal in its allegiance to the north. His disapprovals, his censorious judgments, his want of sympathy for what he did not understand were only the husk of the man, and it was the very strength of his central devotion that made him intolerant of any who seemed to lapse in things great or small from his own measure of fervour. Extreme cases, indeed, the case of the Jew, the Turk, the infidel, he left with faith to the mercy of God, though his human comprehension did not see how they could be capable of receiving it. He did not know; he left them before the throne of Infinite Compassion, and turned his thoughts elsewhere, to his own work of ministering to the sick and needy, to the cultivation of the intellect, the usury of that sterling talent given to man, and all that should make a man more capable of worship, a fitter instrument in the hand of the great Artificer.

The rose colour in the west faded to the nameless and indescribable hue of the hour after sunset, a single spangle of a star flashed in the vault of velvet sky, and dusk, like the slow closing of tired eyes, fell layer after layer over field and copse and river. Lights began to twinkle in the cottages of the village; day with its joys and its work and its rewards was over, and rest was ordained for the world and its myriads. Instinctively the mood of the tranquil hour gained on him, his foot abated a little from the vigour of its stride, the active fervour of his brain cooled a little, and a very human tenderness rose and suffused his thoughts. Here in the church-yard, which he was now crossing, stood the plain marble slab with its lettering, now twenty-four years old, below which lay the remains of her who had been the one passion, short and sweet and bitter, of his life. How often in those years had he wondered, with aching longing for light, what was the design of that interlude, what was the correct reading, so to speak, of the passion that had for a year so absorbed and mastered and overwhelmed him. His wife and he had no spiritual affinity; his love for her had not raised and inspired him, and he, strong and loving as he had been, had not helped her with any success towards the strenuous and active service which he knew to be the bounden duty of every living soul. Had his passion, then, been merely a casual, carnal longing, a frailty of the flesh? Often and often he had been afraid to answer that question honestly, but to-night, as he paused for a moment by the grave, that doubt assailed him no longer, and instead a strange yearning and regret for a missed opportunity took its place. Had he dealt wisely and gently with that sun-lit child? Had he failed to realise what a child she was, and been harsh and deficient in tenderness to a little one?

His head drooped for a moment as he stood there, and then, with all the honesty of a nature as upright as a fir-tree, he answered it. He could not justly condemn himself: he had done his best according to the light that was given him. He had acted in a way he would have advised another to act,—he would act so again now. It had not been easy. Often he had longed to kiss her face into smiles again, and had been stern instead.

Then briskly again he left the grave, and in the gloaming stepped across the lawn into the long window of his study. The lamp was already there, trimmed and lit, his work was spread on the table in orderly array. There were still ten minutes remaining to him before he need dress for dinner, and from habit long-engrained he sat down at once to use them. He found his place, composed his mind to the topic on hand, and dipped his pen in the ink. But, contrary to habit, his attention wandered, and strayed back to the church-yard and until the dressing-bell sounded he sat there looking out of the window with unseeing eyes, questioning, questioning.