There are hours in every man’s day when the main current of his destiny, rising up from some hidden channel, becomes a recognizable and palpable element in his consciousness. Such hours, if a man’s profoundest life is—so to speak—in harmony with the greater gods, are hours of indescribable and tremulous happiness.

It was nothing less than an experience of this kind which flowed deliciously, like a wave of divine ether, over the consciousness of Hamish Traherne on the day following the one when Sorio and Philippa walked so far.

As he crossed his garden in the early morning and entered the church, the warm sun and clear-cut shadows filled him with that sense of indestructible joy to which one of the ancient thinkers has given the beautiful name of ????????? ?d???—the Pleasure of the Ideal Now.

From the eastern window, flooding the floor of the little chancel, there poured into the cool, sweet-smelling place a stream of quivering light. He had opened wide the doors under the tower and left them open and he heard, as he sank on his knees, the sharp clear twittering of swallows outside and the chatter of a flock of starlings. Through every pulse and fibre of his being, as he knelt, vibrated an unutterable current of happiness, of happiness so great that the words of his prayer melted and dissolved and all definite thought melted with them into that rare mood where prayer becomes ecstasy and ecstasy becomes eternal.

Returning to his house without spilling one golden drop of what was being allowed him of the wine of the Immortals, he brought his breakfast out into the garden and ate it, lingeringly and dreamily, by the side of his first roses. These were of the kind known as “the seven sisters”—small and white-petaled with a faint rose-flush—and the penetrating odour of them as he bent a spray down towards his face was itself suggestive of old rich wine, “cooled a long age in the deep-delved earth.”

From the marshes below the parapet came exquisite scents of water-mint and flowering-rush and, along with these, the subtle fragrance, pungent and aromatic, of miles and miles of sun-heated fens.

The grass of his own lawn and the leaves of the trees that overshadowed it breathed the peculiar sweetness—a sweetness unlike anything else in the world—of the first hot days of the year in certain old East Anglian gardens. Whether it is the presence of the sea which endows these places with so rare a quality or the mere existence of reserve and austere withholding in the ways of the seasons there, it were hard to say, but the fact remains that there are gardens in Norfolk and Suffolk—and to Hamish Traherne’s flower-beds in spite of the modesty of their appeal, may well be conceded something of this charm—which surpass all others in the British Isles in the evocation of wistful and penetrating beauty.

The priest had just lit his cigarette and was sipping his tea when he was startled by the sudden appearance of Nance Herrick, white and desperate and panting for breath.

“I had to come to you,” she gasped, refusing his proffered chair and sinking down on the grass. “I had to! I couldn’t bear it. I couldn’t sleep. I couldn’t stop in that house. I saw him last night. He was walking with her near the harbour. I spoke to them. I was quiet—not angry or bitter at all and he let her insult me. He let her whip me with her tongue, wickedly, cruelly and yet so under cover, so sideways—you know the kind of thing, Hamish?—that I couldn’t answer. If I’d been alone with her I could have, but his being there made me stupid, miserable, foolish! And she took advantage of it. She said—oh, such mean, biting things! I can’t say them to you. I hate to think of them. They went right through me like a steel lash. And he stood there and did nothing. He was like a man in a trance. He stood there and let her do it. Hamish—Hamish—I wish I were at the bottom of the sea!”

She bowed her white, grief-distorted face until it was buried in the grass. The sun, playing on her bright hair, made it look like newly-minted gold. Mr. Traherne sank on his knees beside her. His ugliness, intensified by the agitation of his pity, reached a pitch that was almost sublime. He was like a gargoyle consoling a goddess.

“Child, child, listen to me!” he cried, his husky grating voice flinging itself upon the silence of her misery like a load of rubble upon a marble pavement.

“There are moments in our life when no words, however tender, however wise, can do any good. The only way—child, it is so—it is so!—the only way is to find in love itself the thing that can heal. For love can do this, I know it, I have proved it.”

He raised one of his arms with a queer, spasmodic gesture and let it drop as suddenly as he had raised it.

“Love rejoices to bear everything,” he went on. “It forgives and forgives again. It serves its beloved night and day, unseen and unfelt, it draws strength from suffering. When the blows of fate strike it, it sinks into its own heart and rises stronger than fate. When the passing hour’s cruel to it, it sinks away within, below the passing of every possible hour, beyond the hurt of every conceivable stroke. Love does not ask anything. It does not ask to be recognized. It is its own return, its own recognition. Listen to me, child! If what I’m saying to you is not true, if love is not like this, then the whole world is dust and ashes and ‘earth’s base built on stubble’!”

His harsh voice died away on the air and for a little while there was no sound in that garden except the twitter of birds, the hum of insects, and the murmur of the sea. Then she moved, raised herself from the ground and rubbed her face with her hands.

“Thank you, Hamish,” she said.

He got up from his knees and she rose too and they walked slowly together up and down the little grass plot. His harsh voice, harsher than ever when its pitch was modulated, rose and fell monotonously in the sunny air.

“I don’t say to you, Nance, that you shouldn’t expect the worst. I think we always should expect that and prepare to meet it. What I say is that in the very power of the love you feel there is a strength capable of sustaining you through your whole life, whatever happens. And it is out of this very strength—a strength stronger than all the world, my dear—than all the world!—that you’ll be able to give your Adrian what he needs. He needs your love, little one, not your jealousy, nor your self-pity, nor your anger. God knows how much he needs it! And if you sink down into your heart and draw upon that and wait for him and pray for him and endure for him you will see how, in the end, he’ll come back to you! No—I won’t even say that. For in this world he may never realize whose devotion is sustaining him. I’ll say, whether he comes back or not, you’ll have been his only true love and he’ll know it, child, in this world or another, he’ll know you for what you are!”

The sweet, impossible doctrine, older than the centuries, older than Plato, of the supremacy of spiritual passion had never—certainly not in that monastic garden—found a more eloquent apologist. As she listened to his words and her glance lingered upon a certain deeply blue border of larkspurs, which, as they paced up and down mingled with the impression he made upon her, Nance felt that a crisis had indeed arrived in her life—had arrived and gone—the effect of which could never, whatever happened, altogether disappear. She was still unutterably sad. Her new mood brought no superficial comfort. But her sadness had nothing in it now of bitterness or desperation. She entered, at any rate for that hour, into the company of those who resolutely put life’s sweetness away from them and find in the accepted pressure of its sharp sword-point a pride which is its own reward.

This mood of hers still lasted on, when, some hours later, she found herself in the main street of the little town, staring with a half-humorous smile at the reflection of herself in the bow-window of the pastry-cook’s. She had just emerged from the shop adjoining this one, a place where she had definitely committed herself to accept the post of “forewoman” in the superintendence of half a dozen young girls who worked in the leisurely establishment of Miss Pontifex, “the only official dressmaker,” as the advertisement announced, “on that side of Mundham.”

She felt unspeakably relieved at having made this plunge. She had begun to weary of idleness—idleness rendered more bitter by the misery of her relations with Sorio—and the independence guaranteed by the eighteen shillings a week which Miss Pontifex was to pay her seemed like an oasis of solid assurance in a desert of ambiguities. She cared nothing for social prestige. In that sense she was a true daughter of her father, the most “democratic” officer in the British Navy. What gave her a profound satisfaction in the midst of her unhappiness was the thought that now, without leaving Rodmoor, she could, if Rachel’s jealousy or whatever it was, became intolerable, secure some small, separate lodging for herself and her sister.

Linda even, now her organ-playing had advanced so far, might possibly be able to earn something. There were perhaps churches in Mundham willing to pay for such assistance if the difficulty of getting over there on Sundays when the trains were few, could in some way be surmounted. At any rate, she felt, she had made a move in the right direction. For the present, living at Dyke House, she would be able to save every penny Miss Pontifex gave her, and the sense of even this relative independence would strengthen her hand and afford her a sort of vantage-ground whatever happened in the future.

She was still standing in front of the confectioner’s window when she heard a well-known voice behind her and, turning quickly round, found herself face to face with Fingal Raughty. The Doctor looked at her with tender solicitude.

“Feeling the heat?” he said, retaining her fingers in his own and stroking them as one might stroke the petals of a rare orchid.

She smiled affectionately into his eyes and thought how strange an irony it was that every one, except the person she cared most for, should treat her thus considerately.

“Come,” the Doctor said, “now I’ve got you I’m not going to let you go. You must see my rooms! You promised you would, you know.”

She hadn’t the heart to refuse him and together they walked up the street till they came to the tiny red-brick house which the Doctor shared with the family of a Mundham bank-clerk. He opened the door and led her upstairs.

“All this floor is mine,” he explained. “There’s where I see my patients, and here,” he led her into the room looking out on the street, “here’s my study.”

Nance was for the moment inclined to smile at the use of the word “study” as applied to any room in Rodmoor High Street, but when she looked round at walls literally lined with books and at tables and chairs covered with books, some of them obviously rare and valuable, she felt she had not quite done justice to the Doctor’s taste. He fluttered round her now with a hundred delicate attentions, made her remove her hat and gloves and finally placed her in a large comfortable armchair close to the open window. He pulled one of the green blinds down a little way to soften the stream of sunshine and, rushing to his book-case, snatched at a large thin volume which stood with others of the same kind on the lowest shelf. This he dusted carefully with his sleeve and laid gently upon her lap.

“I think you’ll like it,” he murmured. “It’s of no value as an edition, but it’s in his best style. I suppose Miss Doorm has all the old masters up at Dyke House bound in morocco and vellum? Or has she only county histories and maps?”

While his visitor turned over the pages of the work in question, her golden head bent low and her lips smiling, the doctor began piling up more books, one on the top of another, at her side.

“Apuleius!—he’s a strange old fellow, not without interest, but you know him, of course? Petronius Arbiter! you had better not read the text but the illustrations may amuse you. William Blake! There are some drawings here which have a certain resemblance to—to one or two people we know! Bewick! Oh, you’ll enjoy this, if you don’t know it. I’ve got the other volume, too. You mustn’t look at all the vignettes but some of them will please you.”

“But—Fingal—” the girl protested, lifting her head from Pope’s Rape of the Lock illustrated by Aubrey Beardsley—“what are you going to do? I feel as if you were preparing me for a voyage. I’d sooner talk to you than look at any books.”

“I’ll be back in a moment,” he said, throwing at her a nervous and rather harassed look, “I must wash my hands.”

He hurried precipitously from the room and Nance, lifting her eyebrows and shrugging her shoulders, returned to the “Rape of the Lock.”

The doctor’s bathroom was situated, it appeared, in the immediate vicinity of the study. Nance was conscious of the turning of what sounded like innumerable taps and of a rush of mighty waters.

“Is the dear man going to have a bath?” she said to herself, glancing at the clock on the chimney-piece. If her conjecture was right, Dr. Raughty took a long while getting ready for his singularly timed ablution for she heard him running backwards and forwards in the bathroom like a mouse in a cage. She uttered a little sigh and, laying the “Rape of the Lock” on the top of “Bewick,” looked wearily out of the window, her thoughts returning to Sorio and the event of the preceding evening.

Quite ten minutes elapsed before her host returned. He returned in radiant spirits but all that was visible to the eye as the result of his prolonged toilet was a certain smoothness in the lock of hair which fell across his forehead and a certain heightening of the colour of his cheeks. This latter change was obviously produced by vigorous rubbing, not by the application of any cosmetic.

He drew a chair close to her side and ignored with infinite kindness the fact that his pile of books lay untouched where he had placed them.

“Your neck is just like a column of white marble,” he said. “Are your arms the same—I mean are they as white—under this?”

Very gently and using his hands as if they belonged to someone else, he began rolling up the sleeve of her summer frock. Nance was sufficiently young to be pleased at his admiration and sufficiently experienced not to be shocked at his audacity. She let him turn the sleeve quite far back and smiled sadly to herself as she saw how admirably its freshly starched material showed off the delicacy and softness of the arm thus displayed. She was not even surprised or annoyed when she found that the Doctor, having touched several times with the tips of his fingers the curve of her elbow, possessed himself of her hand and tenderly retained it. She continued to look wistfully and dreamily out of the window, her lips smiling but her heart weary, thinking once more what an ironic and bitter commentary it was on the little ways of the world that amorousness of this sort—gentle and delicate though it might be—was all that was offered her in place of what she was losing.

“You ought to be running barefooted and full of excellent joy,” the voice of Dr. Raughty murmured, “along the sands to-day. You ought to be paddling in the sea with your skirts pinned round your waist! Why don’t you let me take you down there?”

She shook her head, turning her face towards him and releasing her fingers.

“I must get back now,” she remarked, looking him straight in the eyes, “so please give me my things.”

He meekly obeyed her and she put on her hat and gloves. As they were going downstairs, she in front of him, Nance had a remote consciousness that Dr. Raughty murmured something in which she caught Adrian’s name. She let this pass, however, and gave him her hand gratefully as he opened the door for her.

“Mayn’t I even see you home?” he asked.

Once more she shook her head. She felt that her nerves, just then, had had enough of playful tenderness.

“Good-bye!” she cried, leaving him on his threshold.

She cast a wistful glance at Baltazar’s cottage as she crossed the green.

“Oh, Adrian, Adrian,” she moaned, “I’d sooner be beaten by you than loved by all the rest of the world!”

It was with a slow and heavy step that Dr. Raughty ascended his little staircase after he had watched her disappear. Entering his room he approached the pile of books left beside her chair and began transporting them, one by one, to their places in the shelves.

“A sweet creature,” he murmured to himself as he did this, “a sweet creature! May ten thousand cartloads of hornified devils carry that damned Sorio into the pit of Hell!”