Meynell and his companion had taken a footpath winding gently down hill and in a northwest direction across one of the most beautiful parks in England. It lay on the fringe of the Chase and contained, within its slopes and glades, now tracts of primitive woodland whence the charcoal burners seemed to have but just departed; now purple wastes of heather, wild as the Chase itself; or again, dense thickets of bracken and fir, hiding primeval and impenetrable glooms. Maudeley House, behind them, a seemly Georgian pile, with a columnar front, had the good fortune to belong to a man not rich enough to live in or rebuild it, but sufficiently attached to it to spend upon its decent maintenance the money he got by letting it. So the delicately faded beauty of the house had survived unspoilt; while there had never been any money to spend upon the park, where the woods and fences looked after themselves year by year, and colliers from the neighbouring villages poached freely.

The two people walking through the ferny paths leading to the cottage of ForkÉd Pond were not, however, paying much attention to the landscape round them. Meynell showed himself at first preoccupied and silent. A load of anxiety depressed his vitality; and on this particular day long hours of literary work and correspondence, beginning almost with the dawn and broken only by the colliery scene of which he had spoken to Mrs. Flaxman, had left deep marks upon him. Yet the girl's voice and manner, and the fragments of talk that passed between them, seemed gradually to create a soothing and liberating atmosphere in which it was possible to speak with frankness, though without effort or excitement.

The Rector indeed had so far very little precise knowledge of what his companion's feeling might be toward his own critical plight. He would have liked to get at it; for there was something in this winning, reserved girl that made him desire her good opinion. And yet he shrank from any discussion with her.

He knew of course that the outlines of what had happened must be known to her. During the ten days since their first meeting both the local and London newspapers had given much space to the affairs of Upcote Minor. An important public meeting in which certain decisions had been taken with only three dissentients had led up to the startling proceedings in the village church which Mrs. Flaxman had described to Louis Manvers. The Bishop had written another letter, this time of a more hurried and peremptory kind. An account of the service had appeared in the Times, and columns had been devoted to it in various Mercian newspapers. After years of silence, during which his heart had burned within him; after a shorter period of growing propaganda and expanding utterance, Meynell realized fully that he had now let loose the floodgates. All round him was rising that wide response from human minds and hearts—whether in sympathy or in hostility—which tests and sifts the man who aspires to be a leader of men—in religion or economics. Every trade union leader lifted on the wave of a great strike, representing the urgent physical need of his fellows, knows what the concentration of human passion can be—in matters concerned with the daily bread and the homes of men. Religion can gather and bring to bear forces as strong. Meynell knew it well; and he was like a man stepping down into a rushing stream from which there is no escape. It must be crossed—that is all the wayfarer knows; but as he feels the water on his body he realizes that the moment is perhaps for life or death.

Such crises in life bring with them, in the case of the nobler personalities, a great sensitiveness; and Meynell seemed to be living in a world where not only his own inner feelings and motives but those of others were magnified and writ large. As he walked beside Mary Elsmere his mind played round what he knew of her history and position; and it troubled him to think that, both for her and her mother, contact with him at this particular moment might be the reviving of old sorrows.

As they paused on the top of a rising ground looking westward he looked at her with sudden and kindly decision.

"Miss Elsmere, are you sure your mother would like to see me? It was very good of you to request that I should accompany you to-night—but—are you sure?"

Mary coloured deeply and hesitated a moment.

"Don't you think I'd better turn back?" he asked her, gently. "Your path is clear before you." He pointed to it winding through the fern. "And you know, I hope, that anything I could do for you and your mother during your stay here I should be only too enchanted to do. The one thing I shrink from doing is to interfere in any way with her rest here. And I am afraid just now I might be a disturbing element."

"No, no! please come!" said Mary, earnestly. Then as she turned her head away, she added: "Of course—there is nothing new—to her—"

"Except that my fight is waged from inside the Church—and your father's from outside. But that might make all the difference to her."

"I don't think so. It is"—she faltered—"the change itself. It is all so terrible to her."

"Any break with the old things? But doesn't it ever present itself to her—force itself upon her—as the upwelling of a new life?" he asked, sadly.

"Ah!—if it didn't in my father's case—"

The girl's eyes filled with tears.

But she quickly checked herself, and they moved on in silence. Meynell, with his pastoral instinct and training, longed to probe and soothe the trouble he divined in her. A great natural dignity in the girl—delicacy of feeling in the man—prevented it.

None the less her betrayal of emotion had altered their relation; or rather had carried it farther. For he had already seen her in contact with tragic and touching things. A day or two after that early morning when he had told the outlines of the Batesons' story to the two ladies who had entertained him at breakfast he had found her in Bateson's cottage with his wife. Bateson was dead, and his wife in that dumb, automaton state of grief when the human spirit grows poisonous to itself. The young girl who came and went with so few words and such friendly timid ways had stirred, as it were, the dark air of the house with a breath of tenderness. She would sit beside the widow, sewing at a black dress, or helping her to choose the text to be printed on the funeral card; or she would come with her hands full of wild flowers, and coax Mrs. Bateson to go in the dusk to the churchyard with them. She had shown, indeed, wonderful inventiveness in filling the first week of loss and anguish with such small incident as might satisfy feeling, and yet take a woman out of herself.

The level sun shone full upon her as she walked beside him, and her face, her simple dress, her attitude stole gradually like a spell on the mind of her companion. It was a remarkable face; the lower lip a little prominent, and the chin firmly rounded. But the smile, though rare, was youth and sweetness itself, and the dark eyes beneath the full mass of richly coloured hair were finely conscious and attentive—disinterested also; so that they won the spectator instead of embarrassing him. She was very lightly and slenderly made, yet so as to convey an impression of strength and physical health. Meynell said to himself that there was something cloistered in her look, like one brought up in a grave atmosphere—an atmosphere of "recollection." At the same time nothing could be merrier—more childish even—than her laugh.

Their talk flowed on, from subject to subject, yet always tending, whether they would or no, toward the matter which was inevitably in both their minds. Insensibly the barrier between them and it broke away. Neither, indeed, forgot the interposing shadow of Catharine Elsmere. But the conversation touched on ideas; and ideas, like fire in stubble, spread far afield. Oxford: the influences which had worked on Elsmere, before Meynell's own youth felt them; men, books, controversies, interwoven for Mary with her father's history, for Meynell with his own; these topics, in spite of misgivings on both sides, could not but reveal them to each other. The growing delight of their conversation was presently beyond Meynell's resisting. And in Mary, the freedom of it, no less than the sense of personal conflict and tragic possibilities that lay behind it, awakened the subtlest and deepest feelings. Poignant, concrete images rushed through her mind—a dying face to which her own had been lifted, as a tiny child; the hall of the New Brotherhood, where she sat sometimes beside her veiled mother; the sad nobility of that mother's life; a score of trifling, heartpiercing things, that, to think of, brought the sob to her throat. Silent revolts of her own too, scattered along the course of her youth, revolts dumb, yet violent; longings for an "ampler ether"—for the great tumultuous clash of thought and doubt, of faith and denial, in a living and daring world. And yet again, times of passionate remorse, in which all movement of revolt had died away; when her only wish had been to smooth the path of her mother, and to soften a misery she but dimly understood.

So that presently she was swept away—as by some released long-thwarted force. And under the pressure of her quick, searching sympathy his talk became insensibly more personal, more autobiographical. He was but little given to confession, but she compelled it. It was as though through his story she sought to understand her father's—to unveil many things yet dark to her.

Thus gradually, through ways direct and indirect, the intellectual story of the man revealed itself to the pure and sensitive mind of the girl. She divined his home and upbringing—his father an Evangelical soldier of the old school, a home imbued with the Puritan and Biblical ideas. She understood something of the struggle provoked—after his ordination, in a somewhat late maturity—by the uprising of the typical modern problems, historical, critical, scientific. She pieced together much that only came out incidentally as to the counsellors within the Church to whom he had gone in his first urgent distress—the Bishop whom he reverenced—his old teachers at Oxford—the new lights at Cambridge.

And the card houses, the frail resting-places, thus built, it seemed, along the route, had lasted long; till at last a couple of small French books by a French priest and the sudden uprush of new life in the Roman Church had brought to the remote English clergyman at once the crystallization of doubt and the passion of a freed faith. "Modernism"—the attempt of the modern spirit, acting religiously, to refashion Christianity, not outside, but inside, the warm limits of the ancient churches—was born; and Richard Meynell became one of the first converts in England.

"Ah, if your father had but lived!" he said at last, turning upon her with emotion. "He died his noble death twenty years ago—think of the difference between then and now! Then the Broad Church movement was at an end. All that seemed so hopeful, so full of new life in the seventies, had apparently died down. Stanley, John Richard Green, Hugh Pearson were dead, Jowett was an old man of seventy; Liberalism within the Church hardly seemed to breathe; the judgment in the Voysey case—as much a defiance of modern knowledge as any Papal encyclical—though people had nearly forgotten it, had yet in truth brought the whole movement to a stand. All within the gates seemed lost. Your father went out into the wilderness, and there, amid everything that was poor and mean and new, he laid down his life. But we!—we are no longer alone, or helpless. The tide has come up to the stranded ship—the launching of it depends now only on the faithfulness of those within it."

Mary was moved and silenced. The man's power, his transparent purity of heart, affected her, as they had already affected thousands. She was drawn to him also, unconsciously, by that something in personality which determines the relations of men and women. Yet there were deep instincts in her that protested. Girl as she was, she felt herself for the moment more alive than he to the dead weight of the World, fighting the tug of those who would fain move it from its ancient bases.

He seemed to guess at her thought; for he passed on to describe the events by which, amid his own dumb or hidden struggle, he had become aware of the same forces working all round him; among the more intelligent and quick-witted miners, hungry for history and science, reading voraciously a Socialist and anti-Christian literature, yet all the while cherishing deep at heart certain primitive superstitions, and falling periodically into hot abysses of Revivalism, under the influence of Welsh preachers; or among the young men of the small middle class, in whom a better education was beginning to awaken a number of new intellectual and religious wants; among women, too, sensitive, intelligent women—

"Ah! but," said Mary, quickly interrupting him, "don't imagine there are many women like Miss Puttenham! There are very, very few!"

He turned upon her with surprise.

"I was not thinking of Miss Puttenham, I assure you. She has taken very little part in this particular movement. I never know whether she is really with us. She stands outside the old things, but I can never make myself happy by the hope that I have been able to win her to the new!"

Mary looked puzzled—interrogative. But she checked her question, and drew him back instead to his narrative—to the small incidents and signs which had gradually revealed to him, among even his brother clergy, years before that date, the working of ideas and thoughts like his own. And now—

He broke off abruptly.

"You have heard of our meeting last week?"

"Of course!"

"There were men there from all parts of the diocese—and some from other counties. It made me think of what a French Catholic Modernist said to me two years ago—'Pius X may write encyclicals as he pleases—I could show him whole dioceses in France that are practically Modernist, where the Seminaries are Modernist, and two thirds of the clergy. The Bishop knows it quite well, and is helpless. Over the border perhaps you get an Ultramontane diocese, and an Ultramontane bishop. But the process goes on. Life and time are for us!'" He paused and laughed. "Ah, of course I don't pretend things are so here—yet. Our reforms in England—in Church and State—broaden slowly down. In France, reform, when it moves at all, tends to be catastrophic. But in the Markborough diocese alone we have won over perhaps a fifth of the clergy, and the dioceses all round are moving. As to the rapidity of the movement in the last few months it has been nothing short of amazing!"

"And what is the end to be? Not only—oh! Not only—to destroy!" said Mary. The soft intensity of the voice, the beauty of the look, touched him strangely.

He smiled, and there was a silence for a minute, as they wandered downward through a purple stretch of heather to a little stream, sun-smitten, that lay across their path. Once or twice she looked at him timidly, afraid lest she might have wounded him.

But at last he said:

"Shall I answer you in the words of a beloved poet?

"'What though there still need effort, strife?
Though much be still unwon?
Yet warm it mounts, the hour of life!
Death's frozen hour is done!

"'The world's great order dawns in sheen
After long darkness rude,
Divinelier imaged, clearer seen,
With happier zeal pursued.

"'What still of strength is left, employ,
This end to help attain—
One common wave of thought and joy
Lifting mankind again!'

"There"—his voice was low and rapid—"there is the goal! a new happiness: to be reached through a new comradeship—a freer and yet intenser fellowship. We want to say to our fellowmen: 'Cease from groping among ruins!—from making life and faith depend upon whether Christ was born at Bethlehem or at Nazareth, whether He rose or did not rise, whether Luke or some one else wrote the Third Gospel, whether the Fourth Gospel is history or poetry. The life-giving force is here, and now! It is burning in your life and mine—as it burnt in the life of Christ. Give all you have to the flame of it—let it consume the chaff and purify the gold. Take the cup of cold water to the thirsty, heal the sick, tend the dying, and feel it thrill within you—the ineffable, the immortal life! Let the false miracle go!—the true has grown out of it, up from it, as the flower from the sheath.' Ah! but then"—he drew himself up unconsciously; his tone hardened—"we turn to the sons of tradition, and we say: 'We too must have our rights in what the past has built up, the past has bequeathed—as well as you! Not for you alone, the institutions, the buildings, the arts, the traditions, that the Christ-life has so far fashioned for itself. They who made them are Our fathers no less than yours—give us our share in them!—we claim it! Give us our share in the cathedrals and churches of our country—our share in the beauty and majesty of our ancestral Christianity.' The men who led the rebellion against Rome in the sixteenth century claimed the plant of English Catholicism. 'We are our fathers' sons, and these things are ours!' they said, as they looked at Salisbury and Winchester. We say the same—with a difference. 'Give us the rights and the citizenship that belong to us! But do not imagine that we want to attack yours. In God's name, follow your own forms of faith—but allow us ours also—within the common shelter of the common Church. We are children of the same God—followers of the same Master. Who made you judges and dividers over us? You shall not drive us into the desert any more. A new movement of revolt has come—an hour of upheaval—and the men, with it!'"

Both stood motionless, gazing over the wide stretch of country—wood beyond wood, distance beyond distance, that lay between them and the Welsh border. Suddenly, as a shaft of light from the descending sun fled ghostlike across the plain, touching trees and fields and farms in its path, two noble towers emerged among the shadows—characters, as it were, that gave a meaning to the scroll of nature. They were the towers of Markborough Cathedral. Meynell pointed to them as he turned to his companion, his face still quivering under the strain of feeling.

"Take the omen! It is for them, in a sense—a spiritual sense—we are fighting. They belong not to any body of men that may chance to-day to call itself the English Church. They belong to England—in her aspect of faith—and to the English people!"

There was a silence. His look came back to her face, and the prophetic glow died from his own. "I should be very, very sorry"—he said anxiously—"if anything I have said had given you pain."

Mary shook her head.

"No—not to me. I—I have my own thoughts. But one must think—of others." Her voice trembled.

The words seemed to suggest everything that in her own personal history had stamped her with this sweet, shrinking look. Meynell was deeply touched. But he did not answer her, or pursue the conversation any farther. He gathered a great bunch of harebells for her, from the sun-warmed dells in the heather; and was soon making her laugh by his stories of colliery life and speech, À propos of the colliery villages fringing the plain at their feet.

* * * * *

The stream, as they neared it, proved to be the boundary between the heath land and the pastures of the lower ground. It ran fresh and brimming between its rushy banks, shadowed here and there by a few light ashes and alders, but in general open to the sky, of which it was the mirror. It shone now golden and blue under the deepening light of the afternoon; and two or three hundred yards away Mary Elsmere distinguished two figures walking beside it—a young man apparently, and a girl. Meynell looked at them absently.

"That's one of the most famous trout-streams in the Midlands. There should be a capital rise to-night. If that man has the sense to put on a sedge-fly, he'll get a creel-full."

"And what is that house among the trees?" asked his companion presently, pointing to a gray pile of building about a quarter of a mile away, on the other side of the stream. "What a wonderful old place!"

For the house that revealed itself stood with an impressive dignity among its stern and blackish woods. The long, plain front suggested a monastic origin; and there was indeed what looked like a ruined chapel at one end. Its whole aspect was dilapidated and forlorn; and yet it seemed to have grown into the landscape, and to be so deeply rooted in it that one could not imagine it away.

Meynell glanced at it.

"That is Sandford Abbey. It belongs, I regret to say, to a neer-do-weel cousin of mine who has spent all his time since he came into it in neglecting his duties to it. Provided the owner of it is safely away, I should advise you and Mrs. Elsmere to walk over and see it one day. Otherwise it is better viewed at a distance. At least those are my own sentiments!"

Mary followed the house with her eyes as they walked along the bank of the stream toward the two figures on the opposite bank.

A sudden exclamation from her companion caught her ear—and a light musical laugh. Startled by something familiar in it, Mary looked across the stream. She saw on the farther bank a few yards ahead a young man fishing, and a young girl in white sitting beside him.

"Hester!—Miss Fox-Wilton!"—the tone showed her surprise; "and who is that with her?"

Meynell, without replying, walked rapidly along the stream to a point immediately opposite the pair.

"Good afternoon, Philip. I did not know you were here. Hester, I am going round by ForkÉd Pond, and then home. I shall be glad to escort you."

"Oh! thank you—thank you so much. But it's very nice here. You can't think what a rise there is. I have caught two myself. Sir Philip has been teaching me."

"She frames magnificently!" said the young man. "How d'ye do, Meynell? A long time since we've met."

"A long time," said Meynell briefly. "Hester, will you meet Miss Elsmere and me at the bridge? We sha'n't take you much out of your way."

He pointed to a tiny wooden bridge across the stream, a hundred yards farther down.

A look of mischievous defiance was flung at Meynell across the stream. "I'm all right, I assure you. Don't bother about me. How do you do, Mary? We don't 'miss' each other, do we? Isn't it a lovely evening? Such good luck I wouldn't go with mother to dine at the White House! Don't you hate dinner parties? I told Mr. Barron that spiders were so much more refined than humans—they did at least eat their flies by themselves! He was quite angry—and I am afraid Stephen was too!"

She laughed again, and so did the man beside her. He was a dark, slim fellow, finely made, dressed in blue serge, and a felt hat, which seemed at the moment to be slipping over the back of his handsome head. From a little distance he produced an impression of Apollo-like strength and good looks. As the spectator came closer, this impression was a good deal modified by certain loose and common lines in the face. But from Mary Elsmere's position only Sir Philip Meryon's good points were visible, and he appeared to her a dazzling creature.

And in point of looks his companion was more than his match. They made indeed a brilliant pair, framed amid the light green of the river bank. Hester Fox-Wilton was sitting on a log with her straw hat on her lap. In pushing along the overgrown stream, the coils of her hair had been disarranged and its combs loosened. The hair was of a warm brown shade, and it made a cloud about her headland face, from which her eyes and smile shone out triumphantly. Exceptionally tall, with clear-cut aquiline features, with the movements and the grace of a wood nymph, the girl carried her beautiful brows and her full throat with a provocative and self-conscious arrogance. One might have guessed that fear was unknown to her; perhaps tenderness also. She looked much older than seventeen, until she moved or spoke; then the spectator soon realized that in spite of her height and her precocious beauty she was a child, capable still of a child's mischief.

And on mischief she was apparently bent this afternoon. Mary Elsmere, shyly amused, held aloof, while Meynell and Miss Fox-Wilton talked across the stream. Meynell's peremptory voice reached her now and then, and she could not help hearing a sharp final demand that the truant should transfer herself at once to his escort.

The girl threw him an odd look; she sprang to her feet, flushed, laughed, and refused.

"Very well!" said Meynell. "Then perhaps, as you won't join us, you will allow me to join you. Miss Elsmere, I am very sorry, but I am afraid I must put off my visit to your mother. Will you give her my regrets?"

The fury in Hester's look deepened. She lost her smile.

"I won't be watched and coerced! Why shouldn't I amuse myself as I please!"

Meanwhile Sir Philip Meryon had laid aside his rod and was apparently enjoying the encounter between his companion and the Rector.

"Perhaps you have forgotten—this is my side of the river, Meynell!" he shouted across it.

"I am quite aware of it," said the Rector, as he shook hands with the embarrassed Mary. She was just moving away with a shy good-bye to the angry young goddess on the farther bank, when the goddess said:

"Don't go, Mary! Here, Sir Philip—take the fly-book!" She flung it toward him. "Goodnight."

And turning her back upon him without any further ceremony, she walked quickly along the stream toward the little bridge which Meynell had pointed out.

"Congratulations!" said Meryon, with a mocking wave of the hand to the Rector, who made no reply. He ran to catch up Mary, and the two joined the girl in white at the bridge. The owner of Sandford Abbey stood meanwhile with his hand on his hip watching the receding figures. There was a smile on his handsome mouth, but it was an angry one; and his muttered remark as he turned away belied the unconcern he had affected.

* * * * *

"That comes, you see, of not letting me be engaged to Stephen!" said
Hester in a white heat, as the three walked on together.

Mary looked at her in astonishment.

"I see no connection," was the Rector's quiet reply. "You know very well that your mother does not approve of Sir Philip Meryon, and does not wish you to be in his company."

"Precisely. But as I am not to be allowed to marry Stephen, I must of course amuse myself with some one else. If I can't be engaged to Stephen, I won't be anything at all to him. But, then, I don't admit that I'm bound."

"At present all you're asked"—said Meynell dryly—"is not to disobey your mother. But don't you think it's rather rude to Miss Elsmere to be discussing private affairs she doesn't understand?"

"Why shouldn't she understand them? Mary, my guardian here and my mother say that I mustn't be engaged to Stephen Barron—that I'm too young—or some nonsense of that kind. And Stephen—oh, well, Stephen's too good for this world! If he really loved me, he'd do something desperate, wouldn't he?—instead of giving in. I don't much mind, myself—I don't really care so much about marrying Stephen—only if I'm not to marry him, and somebody else wants to please me, why shouldn't I let him?"

She turned her beautiful wild eyes upon Mary Elsmere. And as she did so Mary was suddenly seized with a strong sense of likeness in the speaker—her gesture—her attitude—to something already familiar. She could not identify the something, but her gaze fastened itself on the face before her.

Meynell meanwhile answered Hester's tirade.

"I'm quite ready to talk this over with you, Hester, on our way home. But don't you see that you are making Miss Elsmere uncomfortable?"

"Oh, no, I'm not," said Hester coolly. "You've been talking to her of all sorts of grave, stupid things—and she wants amusing—waking up. I know the look of her. Don't you?" She slipped her arm inside Mary's. "You know, if you'd only do your hair a little differently—fluff it out more—you'd be so pretty! Let me do it for you. And you shouldn't wear that hat—no, you really shouldn't. It's a brute! I could trim you another in half an hour. Shall I? You know—I really like you. He sha'n't make us quarrel!"

She looked with a young malice at Meynell. But her brow had smoothed, and it was evident that her temper was passing away.

"I don't agree with you at all about my hat," said Mary with spirit. "I trimmed it myself, and I'm extremely proud of it."

Hester laughed out—a laugh that rang through the trees.

"How foolish you are!—isn't she, Rector? No!—I suppose that's just what you like. I wonder what you have been talking to her about? I shall make her tell me. Where are you going to?"

She paused, as Mary and the Rector, at a point where two paths converged, turned away from the path which led back to Upcote Minor. Mary explained again that Mr. Meynell and she were on the way to the ForkÉd Pond cottage, where the Rector wished to call upon her mother.

Hester looked at her gravely.

"All right!—but your mother won't want to see me. No!—really it's no good your saying she will. I saw her in the village yesterday. I'm not her sort. Let me go home by myself."

Mary half laughed, half coaxed her into coming with them. But she went very unwillingly; fell completely silent, and seemed to be in a dream all the way to the cottage. Meynell took no notice of her; though once or twice she stole a furtive look toward him.

* * * * *

The tiny house in which Catharine Elsmere and her daughter had settled themselves for the summer stood on a narrow isthmus of land belonging to the Maudeley estate, between the Sandford trout-stream and a large rushy pond of two or three acres. It was a very lonely and a very beautiful place, though the neighbourhood generally pronounced it damp and rheumatic. The cottage, sheltered under a grove of firs, looked straight out on the water, and over a bed of water-lilies. All round was a summer murmur of woods, the call of waterfowl, and the hum of bees; for, at the edges of the water, flowers and grasses pushed thickly out into the sunlight from the shadow of the woods.

By the waterside, with a book on her knee, sat a lady who rose as they came in sight.

Meynell approached her, hat in hand, his strong irregular face, which had always in it a touch of naivetÉ, of the child, expressing both timidity and pleasure. The memory of her husband was enshrined deep in the minds of all religious liberals; and it was known to many that while the husband and wife had differed widely in opinion, and the wife had suffered profoundly from the husband's action, yet the love between them had been, from first to last, a perfect and a sacred thing.

He saw a tall woman, very thin, in a black dress. Her brown hair, very lightly touched with gray and arranged with the utmost simplicity, framed a face in which the passage of years had emphasized and sharpened all the main features, replacing also the delicate smoothness of youth by a subtle network of small lines and shadows, which had turned the original whiteness of the skin into a brownish ivory, full of charm. The eyes looked steadily out from their deep hollows; the mouth, austere and finely cut, the characteristic hands, and the unconscious dignity of movement—these personal traits made of Elsmere's wife, even in late middle age, a striking and impressive figure.

Yet Meynell realized at once, as she just touched his offered hand, that the sympathy and the homage he would so gladly have brought her would be unwelcome; and that it was a trial to her to see him.

He sat down beside her, while Mary and Hester—who, on her introduction to Mrs. Elsmere, had dropped a little curtsey learnt at a German school, and full of grace—wandered off a little way along the water-side. Meynell, struggling with depression, tried to make conversation—on anything and everything that was not Upcote Minor, its parish, or its church. Mrs. Elsmere's gentle courtesy never failed; yet behind it he was conscious of a steely withdrawal of her real self from any contact with his. He talked of Oxford, of the great college where he had learnt from, the same men who had been Elsmere's teachers; of current books, of the wild flowers and birds of the Chase; he did his best; but never once was there any living response in her quiet replies, even when she smiled.

He said to himself that she had judged him, and that the judgments of such a personality once formed were probably irrevocable. Would she discourage any acquaintance with her daughter? It startled him to feel how much the unspoken question hurt.

Meanwhile the eyes of his hostess pursued the two girls, and she presently called to them, greeting their reappearance with an evident change and relaxation of manner. She made Hester sit near her, and it was not long before the child, throwing off her momentary awe, was chattering fast and freely, yet, as Mary perceived, with a tact, conscious or unconscious, that kept the chatter within bounds.

Mrs. Elsmere watched the girl's beauty with evident delight, and when Meynell rose to go, and Hester with him, she timidly drew the radiant creature to her and kissed her. Hester opened her big eyes with surprise.

Catharine Elsmere sat silent a moment watching the two departing figures; then as Mary found a place in the grass beside her, she said, with some constraint:

"You walked with him from Maudeley?"

"Mr. Meynell? Yes, I found him there at tea. He was very anxious to pay his respects to you; so I brought him."

"I can't imagine why he should have thought it necessary."

Mary colored brightly and suddenly, under the vivacity of the tone. Then she slipped her hand into her mother's.

"You didn't mind, dearest? Aunt Rose likes him very much, and—and I wanted him to know you!" She smiled into her mother's eyes. "But we needn't see him anymore if—"

Mrs. Elsmere interrupted her.

"I don't wish to be rude to any friend of Aunt Rose's," she said, rather stiffly. "But there is no need we should see him, is there?"

"No," said Mary; her cheek dropped against her mother's knee, her eyes on the water. "No—not that I know of." After a moment she added with apparent inconsequence, "You mean because of his opinions?"

Catharine gave a rather hard little laugh.

"Well, of course he and I shouldn't agree; I only meant we needn't go out of our way—"

"Certainly not. Only I can't help meeting him sometimes!"

Mary sat up, smiling, with her hands round her knees.

"Of course."

A pause. It was broken by the mother—as though reluctantly.

"Uncle Hugh was here while you were away. He told me about the service last Sunday. Your father would never—never—have done such a thing!"

The repressed passion with which the last words were spoken startled Mary. She made no reply, but her face, now once more turned toward the sunlit pond, had visibly saddened. Inwardly she found herself asking—"If father had lived?—if father were here now?"

Her reverie was broken by her mother's voice—softened—breathing a kind of compunction.

"I daresay he's a good sort of man."

"I think he is," said Mary, simply.

They talked no more on the subject, and presently Catharine Elsmere rose, and went into the house.

Mary sat on by the water-side thinking. Meynell's aspect, Meynell's words, were in her mind—little traits too and incidents of his parochial life that she had come across in the village. A man might preach and preach, and be a villain! But for a man—a hasty, preoccupied, student man—so to live, through twenty years, among these vigorous, quick-tempered, sharp-brained miners, as to hold the place among them Richard Meynell held, was not to be done by any mere pretender, any spiritual charlatan. How well his voice pleased her!—his tenderness to children—his impatience—his laugh.

The thoughts, too, he had expressed to her on their walk ran kindling through her mind. There were in her many half-recognized thirsts and desires of the spirit that seemed to have become suddenly strong and urgent under the spur of his companionship.

She sat dreaming; then her mother called her to the evening meal, and she went in. They passed the evening together, in the free and tender intimacy which was their habitual relation. But in the mind of each there were hidden movements of depression or misgiving not known to the other.

Meanwhile the Rector had walked home with his ward. A stormy business! For much as he disliked scolding any young creature, least of all, Hester, the situation simply could not be met without a scolding—by Hester's guardian. Disobedience to her mother's wishes; disloyalty toward those who loved her, including himself; deceit, open and unabashed, if the paradox may be allowed—all these had to be brought home to her. He talked, now tenderly, now severely, dreading to hurt her, yet hoping to make his blows smart enough to be remembered. She was not to make friends with Sir Philip Meryon. She was not to see him or walk with him. He was not a fit person for her to know; and she must trust her elders in the matter.

"You are not going to make us all anxious and miserable, dear Hester!" he said at last, hoping devoutly that he was nearly through with his task. "Promise me not to meet this man any more!" He looked at her appealingly.

"Oh, dear, no, I couldn't do that," said Hester cheerfully.

"Hester!"

"I couldn't. I never know what I shall want to do. Why should I promise?"

"Because you are asked to do so by those who love you, and you ought to trust them."

Hester shook her head.

"It's no good promising. You'll have to prevent me."

Meynell was silent a moment. Then he said, not without sternness:

"We shall of course prevent you, Hester, if necessary. But it would be far better if you took yourself in hand."

"Why did you stop my being engaged to Stephen?" she cried, raising her head defiantly.

He saw the bright tears in her eyes, and melted at once.

"Because you are too young to bind yourself, my child. Wait a while, and if in two years you are of the same mind, nobody will stand in your way."

"I sha'n't care a rap about him in two years," said Hester vehemently. "I don't care about him now. But I should have cared about him if I had been engaged to him. Well, now, you and mamma have meddled—and you'll see!"

They were nearing the opening of the lane which led from the main road to North Leigh, Lady Fox-Wilton's house. As she perceived it Hester suddenly took to flight, and her light form was soon lost to view in the summer dusk.

The Rector did not attempt to pursue her. He turned back toward the Rectory, perturbed and self-questioning. But it was not possible, after all, to set a tragic value on the love affair of a young lady who, within a week of its breaking off, had already consoled herself with another swain. Anything less indicative of a broken heart than Hester's behaviour during that week the Rector could not imagine. Personally he believed that she spoke the simple truth when she said she no longer cared for Stephen. He did not believe she ever had cared for him.

Still he was troubled, and on his way toward the Rectory he turned aside. He knew that on his table he should find letters waiting that would take him half the night. But they must lie there a bit longer. At Miss Puttenham's gate he paused, hesitated a moment, then went straight into the twilight garden, where he imagined that he should find its mistress.

He found her, in a far corner, among close-growing trees and with her usual occupations, her books and her embroidery, beside her. But she was neither reading nor sewing. She sprang up to greet him, and for an hour of summer twilight they held a rapid, low-voiced conversation.

When he pressed her hand at parting they looked at each other, still overshadowed by the doubt and perplexity which had marked the opening of their interview. But he tried to reassure her.

"Put from you all idea of immediate difficulty," he said earnestly. "There really is none—none at all. Stephen is perfectly reasonable, and as for the escapade to-day—"

The woman before him shook her head.

"She means to marry at the earliest possible moment—simply to escape from Edith—and that house. We sha'n't delay it long. And who knows what may happen if we thwart her too much?"

"We must delay it a year or two, if we possibly can—for her sake—and for yours," said Meynell firmly. "Good night, my dear friend. Try and sleep—put the anxiety away. When the moment comes—and of course I admit it must come—you will reap the harvest of the love you have sown. She does love you!—I am certain of that."

He heard a low sound—was it a sobbing breath?—as Alice Puttenham disappeared in the darkness which had overtaken the garden.