On the following morning, Blantyre went away. He was absent from Hornham for two days, and it was understood that he had gone to visit Lord Huddersfield. Hamlyn and his doings were not in any way mentioned by the two other clergy.

The days of his absence were a time of great unrest and mental debate for Lucy.

She was at a crisis in her life. She had definitely come to a moment when she must choose between one thing or another. It is a commonplace of some preachers to say that this moment of definite choice comes to every one at least once in their lives. But the truth of the assertion is at least doubtful. Many people are spared the pain of what is more or less an instantaneous decision. They merge themselves gradually, in this or that direction, the right or the wrong. And they are the more fortunate.

For Lucy, however, the tide was at the flood. She must push out upon it and hoist her sail, but whether she should go east or west, run before the wind or beat up into the heart of it—that she must now decide.

She had no illusions about her position. To marry James Poyntz meant one thing, to refuse him meant another. In the first place, she wanted to be married. Physically, socially, mentally, she was perfectly aware that she would be happier. Her nature needed the complement of a husband. She was pure, but not virginal, in temperament. She put it to herself that—as she believed—she had a talent for wifehood.

Here was a young man who satisfied all her instincts of what was fitting in a man she could marry. She did not love him, but she admired, liked, and respected him. Something of the not unhealthy cynicism—the sane cynicism—of a woman of the world had entered into her. She wasn't a sentimentalist, she didn't think that the "love" of the poet and story-teller was the only thing in the relation of a wife to a husband. She had seen many marriages, she had watched the firm, strong affection that came after marriage, and she saw that it was a good, worthy, and constant thing.

She had been much in France. Lady Linquest had friends and relatives among the stately families of the Faubourg St. Germain. Those weddings in France that were decorously arranged by papa and mamma, how did they turn out? On the whole well enough, happily enough. It was only the ignorant lower middle-class of England that thought France was a mighty lupanar and adultery a joke.

And in marrying Poyntz she would marry a man whom she was worthy of intellectually. He would satisfy every instinct she possessed—every instinct but one.

And here, she knew, here lay the root of the whole question.

The very strongest influence that can direct and urge any soul towards a holy life is the society and companionship, even the distant contemplation, of a saintly man or woman.

The force of example acts as a lens. It focuses all the impulses towards good and concentrates them. In making clear the beauty of holiness, it shows that it is not a vague beauty, but an ideal which may be realised by the observer.

Lucy had been living with saintly folk. Bernard was saintly—if ever a man was; the bulldog, King, was a saint and walked with God. Stephens was a schoolboy, full of slang and enthusiasm, blunders and love of humanity, but he was saintly too. Miss Cass, the housekeeper with the face of a horse, who called "day" "dy" and the Mass "Mess," she was a holy woman. Before the ugly, unlettered spinster, the society girl, with all her power and charm, had learned to bow in her mind.

That was Lucy's great virtue. She was frank with herself. She glossed over nothing, she pretended nothing. It is the person who postures and poses before himself who is in the chiefest danger. And Carr, well, Carr was a saintly man also. He hadn't got the more picturesque trimmings that the others had. His spiritual life was not so vividly expressed in, and witnessed to, by his clothes and daily habit of life. But he was a saintly man. As she thought of him Lucy thought of him as man and saint.

All these people lived for one thing, had one aim, believed one thing.

They lived to serve our Lord, to do His work, to adore Him.

Why, even Bob, the navvy, whom Father King had knocked down as a beery blackguard and set up again as a butler, even Bob was feeling a slow and ponderous way towards sainthood! He could not boast a first-rate intelligence, but, he loved our Lord.

Yes!—ah, that was the most beautiful thing of all. To love Him.

"Do I love Him?" Lucy asked herself during those two days.

And the answer that came to her was a very strange one. It was this. She loved our Lord, but she could not make up her mind to give up everything earthly and material for Him. She wanted a compromise.

In fact, she was near the gates of the spiritual life, but she had not entered them.

She did not disguise one fact from herself. If she married Poyntz she would immediately be withdrawn, and withdrawn for ever, from the new influences which were beginning to permeate her, to draw her towards the state of a Christian who is vowed and militant.

She knew the influence that as her husband James would have. His ideals were noble and high, his life was pure and worthy. But it was not the life that Christ had made so plain and clear. The path the Church showed was not the path James would follow, or one which as his wife she could well follow.

She believed sincerely, as her brother himself would have told her, that a man like Poyntz was only uneducated in spiritual things, not lost to them for ever.

But she was also sure that he would make no spiritual discoveries in this world.

Marriage with him meant going back. It meant turning away from the Light.

The struggle with the training of years, the earthly ideals of nearly all her life, was acute. But hour by hour, she began to draw nearer and nearer to the inevitable solution.

Now and again, she went into the silent church. Then, kneeling before the Blessed Sacrament, she saw the path quite clear.

Afterwards, back in her room again, the voices of the material world were heard. But they became weaker and more weak as the hours went on.

On the day that Bernard was to return, she received a long and passionate letter from her lover.

He had the wonderful gift of prose. He understood, as hardly any of us understand, how to treat words (on certain occasions of using them) as if they were almost notes in some musical composition. His letter was beautiful.

She read it page by page, with a heart that had begun to beat with quickened interest, until she came to a passage which jarred and hurt. James had made an end of his most impassioned and intimate passages, and was making his keen satiric comment upon general affairs—quite as he had done in his letters before his actual avowal.

"I saw my father to-day in St. James, and we went to his club and lunched together. I respect him more and more, for his consistency, every time I meet him. And I wonder more and more at his childishness at the same time. It seems he had just left your brother. As you are in the thick of all the mumbo-jumbo, perhaps you will have heard of the business that seems to be agitating my poor dear sire into a fever. It seems that, a day or two ago, an opposition hero who has consecrated his life to the Protestant cause—none other than the notorious Hamlyn himself—purloined a consecrated wafer from some church and has been exhibiting it at public meetings to show that it is just as it ever was—a pinch of flour and no more. My father has made himself utterly miserable over the proceedings of this merry-andrew. As you know, I take but little interest in the squabbles of the creeds, but the spectacle of a sane and able man caught up in the centre of these phantasies makes me pause and makes my contempt sweeten into pity."

As Lucy read the letter, she thought of the scene on the night when Carr had brought the news. She thought of her own quick pain as she heard it, of how her brother was struck down as with a sword. And especially there came to her the vision of the two priests, King and Stephens, praying all night long before the Host.

She pushed the letter away from her, nor did she read it again. It seemed alien, out of tune with her life.

She went into the church to pray.

When she came away, her resolution was nearly taken.

Bernard came home about three in the afternoon. His manner was quiet. He was sad, but he seemed relieved also.

Lucy was walking in the garden with him, soon after his return, when Stephens and Dr. Hibbert came down from the house and walked quickly up to them.

"Vicar," the doctor said, "Miss Pritchett is dying."

Blantyre started. "Oh, I didn't know it was as bad as that," he said. "Is it imminent?"

"A matter of twenty hours I should say," the doctor replied; "I bring you a message from her."

Blantyre's face lighted up. Great tenderness came over it as he heard that the woman who had injured him and sought to harm the Church had sent him a message.

"Poor woman," he said; "what is it—God bless her!"

"She has asked for you and the other clergy to come to her. She wishes me to bring you and such other members of the congregation as will come. She wishes to make a profession of Faith."

"But when, how—" the vicar asked, bewildered.

The doctor explained. "The Hamlyns are with her; she is frightened by them, but not only that, she bitterly repents what she has done. Poor soul! Blantyre, she is very penitent, she remembers the Faith. She asks—" He drew the vicar aside. Lucy could hear no more. But she saw deep sympathy come out upon her brother's face.

The three men—Stephens had remained with the doctor—came near her again.

"My motor is outside," the doctor said hurriedly.

"How long would it take?" asked the vicar.

"——if the Bishop is in—back in an hour and a half——"

The vicar took Stephens aside and spoke earnestly with him for a few moments. The young man listened gravely and then hurried away. Before the vicar and the doctor joined Lucy again—they stood in private talk a moment—she heard the "toot" of the motor-car hum on the other side of the garden wall.

Wondering what all this might mean, she was about to cross the lawn towards the two men, when she saw Father King and Mr. Carr coming out of the house. These two joined the vicar and Dr. Hibbert. The four men stood in a ring. Blantyre seemed to be explaining something to the new-comers. Now and then the doctor broke in with a burst of rapid explanation.

Lucy began to be full of wonder. She felt ignored, she tried not to feel that. Something was afoot that she did not quite understand.

In the middle of her wonder the men came towards her.

Bernard took her arm. "Mavourneen," he said, "will you come with us to poor Miss Pritchett? She's been asking if you'll come and forgive her and part good friends. She may die to-night, the doctor says. You'll come?"

"Of course I'll come, dear."

"She has repented of her hostility to the Church, and desires to make a public statement of her faith before she dies. And she has asked for the Sacrament of Unction.... Stephens has gone to the Bishop of Stepney on the doctor's motor-car. In an hour we will go to Malakoff."

The doctor took King by the arm and led him away. They talked earnestly together.

Blantyre turned to Carr.

"Will ye come with us all to the poor soul's bedside?" he asked.

"Yes," Carr answered. "I don't know what you purpose exactly—and I don't care! I trust you as a brother now, Blantyre, I am learning every day. I'm a conservative, you know, new things are distasteful to me. But I am learning that there are medicines, pro salute animÆ."

"New things!" Blantyre said; "ye're an old Protestant at heart still. Did they teach ye no history at Cambridge except that the Church of England began at the Reformation? Now, listen while I tell you what the service is. You remember St. James v. 14, 15?"

Carr nodded. He began to quote from memory, for his knowledge of the Scriptures was profound, a knowledge even more accurate and full than perhaps any of the three priests of St. Elwyn's could claim, though they were scholars and students one and all.

"Is any sick among you? let him call for the elders of the church; and let them pray over him, anointing him with oil in the name of our Lord; and the prayer of faith shall save the sick, and the Lord shall raise him up, and if he have committed sins, they shall be forgiven him."

"Well, I suppose that is fairly explicit?" Blantyre said. "Mr. Hamlyn would tell us that Unction is a conjuring trick invented by the Jesuits. And you have always thought it Popish and superstitious. Now, haven't you, Carr, be honest!"

"Yes."

"Well, you will see the service to-day. We follow the ancient order of the Church of England. Why did you object, Carr? I'd like to get at your mental attitude. What is there unscriptural, bad, or unseemly about Unction? Here's a poor woman who has strayed from the fold. She wishes to die at peace with every one, she wishes that the inward unction of the Holy Spirit may be poured into the wounds of her soul, she wants to be forgiven for the sake of our Lord's most meritorious Cross and Passion! If it is God's will, she may be cured."

He spoke with great fervour and earnestness.

Carr bowed his head and thought. "Yes," he said, "I have been very prejudiced and hard, sometimes. It is so easy to condemn what one does not know about, so hard to have sympathy with what one has not appreciated."

Blantyre caught him by the arm and they walked the lawn for a long time in fraternal intercourse.

Lucy sat down with the doctor, but her eyes often turned to the tall, grave figure, whose lengthening shadow sometimes reached to her feet and touched them.

At last they heard the panting of the returning motor-car. Stephens had arrived with the oil that the Bishop had blessed.

The whole party got into the car, which was a large one, and they set off rapidly through the streets towards Malakoff House.

How strange it was, Lucy thought, this swift career of moderns in the wonderful machine of their age, this rush to the bedside of a dying woman with the last consolation of the Church! It was full of awe, but full of sweetness also. It seemed to show—and how plainly—the divine continuity of the Faith, the harmonic welding of the order and traditions of our Lord's own time with the full vivid life of the nineteenth century.

They were shown into the grim house. Truly the shadow of death seemed to lie there, was exhaled from the massive funereal furniture of a bygone generation, with all its faded pomp and circumstance.

The mistress of it all was going away from it for ever, would never hold her tawdry court in that grim drawing-room any more.

Dr. Coxe, Hibbert's assistant, came down-stairs and met them.

"I have got the two Hamlyns out of the house at last," he whispered. "They were distressing the patient greatly. I insisted, however. We had a row on the stairs—fortunately, I don't think the patient could hear it. I'm sorry, doctor, but I had to use a little physical persuasion to the young one."

"Never mind, Coxe," Hibbert answered. "I'll see that nothing comes of it. They won't dare to do anything. I will see to that. Is Miss Pritchett ready? Can we go up?"

"Yes," the young man answered, looking curiously at the four priests and the grave girl who was with them in her gay summer frock. "Miss Davies is there."

He was a big, young Scotsman, with a profound contempt for religion, but skilled and tender in his work, nevertheless.

"Will you come up?" Hibbert whispered, taking him a little apart from the others.

"I'd rather be excused, old man," he answered. "Call me if I'm wanted. I can't stand this mumbo-jumbo, you know!"

Hibbert nodded curtly. He understood the lad very well. "Will you follow me, Father?" he said to Blantyre.

Blantyre put on his surplice and stole. Then they all went silently up the wide stairs, with their soft carpet and carved balusters, into the darkened chamber of death.

The dying woman was propped up by pillows. Her face was the colour of grey linen, the fringes of hair she wore in health were gone.

A faint smile came to her lips. Then, as she saw Lucy, she called to her in a clear, thin voice that seemed as if it came from very far away.

"Kiss me, my dear," she said; "forgive me."

Lucy kissed the old, wrinkled face tenderly. Her tears fell upon it in a sacrament of forgiveness and holy amity.

"I want just to say to all of you," Miss Pritchett said, "that I have been untrue to what I really believed, and I have helped the enemies of the Faith. I never forgot your teaching, Father, I knew all the time I was doing wrong. I ask all of you to forgive me as I believe Jesus has forgiven me."

A murmur of kindliness came from them all.

"Then I can go in peace," she gasped. Then with a faint and pathetic shadow of her old manner she turned to Gussie. "Hush!" she said. "Stop sniffling, Miss Davies! I am very happy. Now, Father——"

Her eyes closed and her hands remained still. They saw all earthly thoughts die out of the wrinkled old face, now turned wholly to God.

They all knelt save the vicar, who had placed the oil in an ampulla upon a table.

Then he began the 71st Psalm. "In Thee, O Lord, have I put my trust, let me never be put to confusion: but rid me, and deliver me, in Thy righteousness, incline Thine ear unto me, and save me."

There was no sound in the chamber save that of the ancient Hebrew song.

"Forsake me not, O God, in mine old age, when I am grey-headed: until I have showed Thy strength unto this generation, and Thy power to all them that are yet for to come.

"Thy righteousness, O God, is very high: and great things are they that Thou hast done; O God, who is like unto Thee?"

Then, all together, they said the antiphon: "O Saviour of the world, who by Thy Cross and precious Blood hast redeemed us, save us and help us, we humbly beseech Thee, O Lord."

The central figure in the huge four-post bed lay still and waxen. But when the priest came up to it with the oil, the eyes opened and looked steadfastly into his face.

He dipped his thumb into the silver vessel and made the sign of the Cross on the eyes, the ears, the lips, the nostrils, and the hands, saying each time as he did so:

"Through this unction, and of His most tender mercy, may the Lord pardon thee whatever sins thou hast committed."

The whispering words that brought renewal of lost innocence to the dying woman sank into Lucy's heart, never to leave it. In the presence of these wondrous mysteries, death, and death vanquished by Christ, sin purged and forgiven in the Sacrament, her resolution was made. She knew that she would fix her eyes upon the Cross, never to take them from it more.

She saw her brother bending over the still figure, his white surplice ghostlike in the gloom of the hangings, as he wiped the anointed parts with wool.

Then Stephens brought him a basin of clear water and he washed his hands.

Raising his arm, he said:

"In the name of the Father, and of the Son, and of the Holy Ghost, may this anointing with oil be to thee for the purification of thy mind and body, and may it fortify and defend thee against the darts of evil spirits. Amen."

Two more prayers were said and then came the Blessing.

All rose from their knees. As Lucy slipped from the room, she saw the doctor was bending over the waxen figure in the bed.

She heard her brother and his two assistant priests beginning other prayers, in a louder voice, a sort of litany, it seemed.

She found Carr was beside her descending the stairs.

"What is that?" she whispered.

"The prayers for the commendation of a departing soul; she is going. God rest her and give her peace."

"Amen," said Lucy.

They came down into the hall, where they stood for a moment quite alone. Both were greatly agitated, both felt drawn together by some great power.

"How beautiful it is!" Carr said at length. "Our Lord is with her. May we all die so."

"Poor, dear woman!"

"In a few moments she will be in the supreme and ineffable glory of Paradise. I want to see trees and flowers, to think happily of the wonderful mercy and goodness of God among the things He has made. I should like to walk in the park for an hour, to hear the birds and see the children play. Will you come with me?"

"Yes, I will come."

He took her hand and bowed low over it.

"I have a great thing to ask of you," he said.

They walked soberly together until they came to the railed-in open space. To each the air seemed thick with unspoken thoughts.

The park was a poor place enough. But flowers grew there, the grass was green, it was not quite Hornham. They sat upon a bench and for a minute or two both were silent. Lucy knew a serenity at this moment such as she had hardly ever known. She was as some mariner who, at the close of a long and tempestuous voyage, comes at even-tide towards harbour over a still sea. The coastwise lights begin to glimmer, the haven is near.

In her mind and heart, at that moment, she was reconciled to and in tune with all that is beautiful in human and Divine.

She sat there, this well-known society girl, who, all her life, had lived with the great and wealthy of the world, in great content. In the "park" of Hornham, with the poor clergyman, she knew supreme content.

In a low voice that shook with the intensity of his feeling and yet was resolute and informed with strength, Carr asked Lucy to be his wife.

She gave him her hand very simply and happily. A river that had long been weary had at last wound safe to sea. That she should be the wife of this man was, she knew, one of the gladdest and most merciful ordinances of God.