Hester and Meynell walked down the avenue, side by side. Behind them, the lunette window under the roof opened again, and a woman's face, framed in black, touzled hair, looked out, grinned and disappeared.

Hester carried her head high, a scornful defiance breathing from the flushed cheeks and tightened lips. Meynell made no attempt at conversation, till just as they were nearing the lodge he said—"We shall find Stephen a little farther on. He was riding, and thought you might like his horse to give you a lift home."

"Oh, a plot!"—cried Hester, raising her chin still higher—"and
Stephen in it too! Well, really I shouldn't have thought it was worth
anybody's while to spy upon my very insignificant proceedings like this.
What does it matter to him, or you, or any one else what I do?"

She turned her beautiful eyes—tragically wide and haughty—upon her companion. There was absurdity in her pose, and yet, as Meynell uncomfortably recognized, a new touch of something passionate and real.

The Rector made no reply, for they were at the turn of the road and behind it Stephen and his horse were to be seen waiting.

Stephen came to meet them, the bridle over his arm.

"Hester, wouldn't you like my horse? It is a long way home. I can send for it later."

She looked proudly from one to the other. Her colour had suddenly faded, and from the pallor, the firm, yet delicate, lines of the features emerged with unusual emphasis.

"I think you had better accept," said Meynell gently. As he looked at her, he wondered whether she might not faint on their hands with anger and excitement. But she controlled herself, and as Stephen brought the brown mare alongside, and held out his hand, she put her foot in it, and he swung her to the saddle.

"I don't want both of you," she said, passionately. "One warder is enough!"

"Hester!" cried Stephen, reproachfully. Then he added, trying to smile,
"I am going into Markborough. Any commission?"

Hester disdained to answer. She gathered up the reins and set the horse in motion. Stephen's way lay with them for a hundred yards. He tried to make a little indifferent conversation, but neither Meynell nor Hester replied. Where the lane they had been following joined the Markborough road, he paused to take his leave of them, and as he did so he saw his two companions brought together, as it were, into one picture by the overcircling shade of the autumnal trees which hung over the road; and he suddenly perceived as he had never yet done the strange likeness between them. Perplexity, love—despairing and jealous love—a passionate championship of the beauty that was being outraged and insulted by the common talk and speculation of indifferent and unfriendly mouths; an earnest desire to know the truth, and the whole truth, that he might the better prove his love, and protect his friend; and a dismal certainty through it all that Hester had been finally snatched from him—these conflicting feelings very nearly overpowered him. It was all he could do to take a calm farewell of them. Hester's eyes under their fierce brows followed him along the road.

Meanwhile she and Meynell turned into a bridle-path through the woods. Hester sat erect, her slender body adjusting itself with unconscious grace to the quiet movements of the horse, which Meynell was leading. Overhead the October day was beginning to darken, and the yellow leaves shaken by occasional gusts were drifting mistily down on Hester's hair and dress, and on the glossy flanks of the mare.

At last Meynell looked up. There was intense feeling in his face—a deep and troubled tenderness.

"Hester!—is there no way in which I can convince you that if you go on as you have been doing—deceiving your best friends—and letting this man persuade you into secret meetings—you will bring disgrace on yourself, and sorrow on us? A few more escapades like to-day, and we might not be able to save you from disgrace."

He looked at her searchingly.

"I am going to choose for myself!" said Hester after a moment, in a low, resolute voice; "I am not going to sacrifice my life to anybody."

"You will sacrifice it if you go on flirting with this man—if you will not believe me—who am his kinsman and have no interest whatever in blackening his character—when I tell you that he is a bad man, corrupted by low living and self-indulgence, with whom no girl should trust herself. The action you have taken to-day, your deliberate defiance of us all, make it necessary that I should speak in even plainer terms to you than I have done yet; that I should warn you as strongly as I can that by allowing this man to make love to you—perhaps to propose a runaway match to you—how do I know what villainy he may have been equal to?—you are running risks of utter disaster and disgrace."

"Perhaps. That is my affair."

The girl's voice shook with excitement.

"No!—it is not your affair only. No man liveth to himself, and no man dieth to himself! It is the affair of all those who love you—of your family—of your poor Aunt Alice, who cannot sleep for grieving—"

Hester raised her free hand, and angrily pushed back the masses of fair hair that were falling about her face.

"What is the good of talking about 'love,' Uncle Richard?" She spoke with a passionate impatience—"You know very well that nobody at home loves me. Why should we all be hypocrites? I have got, I tell you, to look after myself, to plan my life for myself! My mother can't help it if she doesn't love me. I don't complain; but I do think it a shame you should say she does, when you know—know—know—she doesn't! My sisters and brothers just dislike me—that's all there is in that! All my life I've known it—I've felt it. Why, when I was a baby they never played with me—they never made a pet of me—they wouldn't have me in their games. My father positively disliked me. Whenever the nurse brought me downstairs—he used to call to her to take me up again. Oh, how tired I got of the nursery!—I hated it—I hated nurse—I hated all the old toys—for I never had any new ones. Do you remember"—she turned on him—"that day when I set fire to all the clean clothes—that were airing before the fire?"

"Perfectly!" said the Rector, with an involuntary smile that relaxed the pale gravity of his face.

"I did it because I hadn't been downstairs for three nights. I might have been dead for all anybody cared. Then I was determined they should care—and I got hold of the matches. I thought the clothes would burn first—and then my starched frock would catch fire—and then—everybody would be sorry for me at last. But unfortunately I got frightened, and ran up the passage screaming—silly little fool! That might have made an end of it—once for all—"

Meynell interrupted—

"And after it," he said, looking her in the eyes—"when the fuss was over—I remember seeing you in Aunt Alsie's arms. Have you forgotten how she cried over you, and defended you—and begged you off? You were ill with terror and excitement; she took you off to the cottage, and nursed you till you were well again, and it had all blown over; as she did again and again afterward. Have you forgotten that—when you say that no one loved you?"

He turned upon her with that bright penetrating look, with its touch of accusing sarcasm, which had so often given him the mastery over erring souls. For Meynell had the pastoral gift almost in perfection; the courage, the ethical self-confidence and the instinctive tenderness which belong to it. The certitudes of his mind were all ethical; and in this region he might have said with Newman that "a thousand difficulties cannot make one doubt."

Hester had often yielded, to this power of his in the past, and it was evident that she trembled under it now. To hide it she turned upon him with fresh anger.

"No, I haven't forgotten it!—and I'm not an ungrateful fiend—though of course you think it. But Aunt Alsie's like all the others now. She—she's turned against me!" There was a break in the girl's voice that she tried in vain to hide.

"It isn't true, Hester! I think you know it isn't true."

"It is true! She has secrets from me, and when I ask her to trust me—then she treats me like a child—and shakes me off as if I were just a stranger. If she holds me at arm's-length, I am not going to tell her all my affairs!"

The rounded bosom under the little black mantle rose and fell tumultuously, and angry tears shone in the brown eyes. Meynell had raised his head with a sudden movement, and regarded her intently.

"What secrets?"

"I found her—one day—with a picture—she was crying over. It—it was some one she had been in love with—I am certain it was—a handsome, dark man. And I begged her to tell me—and she just got up and went away. So then I took my own line!"

Hester furiously dashed away the tears she had not been able to stop.

Meynell's look changed. His voice grew strangely pitiful and soft.

"Dear Hester—if you knew—you couldn't be unkind to Aunt Alice."

"Why shouldn't I know? Why am I treated like a baby?"

"There are some things too bitter to tell,"—he said gravely—"some griefs we have no right to meddle with. But we can heal them—or make them worse. You"—his kind eyes scourged her again—"have been making everything worse for Aunt Alsie for a long time past."

Hester shrugged her shoulders passionately, as though to repel the charge, but she said nothing. They moved on in silence for a little. In Meynell's mind there reigned a medley of feelings—tragic recollections, moral questionings, which time had never silenced, perplexity as to the present and the future, and with it all, the liveliest and sorest pity for the young, childish, violent creature beside him. It was not for those who, with whatever motives, had contributed to bring her to that state and temper, to strike any note of harshness.

Presently, as they neared the end of the woody path, he looked up again. He saw her sitting sullenly on the gently moving horse, a vision of beauty at bay. The sight determined him toward frankness.

"Hester!—I have told you that if you go on flirting with Philip Meryon you run the risk of disgrace and misery, because he has no conscience and no scruples, and you are ignorant and inexperienced, and have no idea of the fire you are playing with. But I think I had better go farther. I am going to say what you force me to say to you—young as you are. My strong belief is that Philip Meryon is either married already, or so entangled that he has no right to ask any decent woman to marry him. I have suspected it a long time. Now you force me to prove it."

Hester turned her head away.

"He told me I wasn't to believe what you said about him!" she said in her most obstinate voice.

"Very well. Then I must set at once about proving it. The reasons which make me believe it are not for your ears." Then his tone changed—"Hester!—my child!—you can't be in love with that fellow—that false, common fellow!—you can't!"

Hester tightened her lips and would not answer. A rush of distress came over Meynell as he thought of her movement toward Philip in the garden. He gently resumed:

"Any day now might bring the true lover, Hester!—the man who would comfort you for all the past, and show you what joy really means. Be patient, dear Hester—be patient! If you wanted to punish us for not making you happy enough, well, you have done it! But don't plunge us all into despair—and take a little thought for your old guardian, who seems to have the world on his shoulders, and yet can't sleep at nights, for worrying about his ward, who won't believe a word he says, and sets all his wishes at defiance."

His manner expressed a playful and reproachful affection. Their eyes met. Hester tried hard to maintain her antagonism, and he was well aware that he was but imperfectly able to gauge the conflict of forces in her mind. He resumed his pleading with her—tenderly—urgently. And at last she gave way, at least apparently. She allowed him to lay a friendly hand on hers that held the reins, and she said with a long bitter breath:

"Oh, I know I'm a little beast!"

"My old-fashioned ideas don't allow me to apply that epithet to young women! But if you'll say 'I want to be friends, Uncle Richard, and I won't deceive you any more,' why, then, you'll make an old fellow happy! Will you?"

Slowly she let her cold fingers slip into his warm, protecting palm as he smiled upon her. She yielded to the dignity and charm of Meynell's character as she had done a thousand times before; but in the proud, unhappy look she bent upon him there were new and disquieting things—prophecies of the coming womanhood, not to be unravelled. Meynell pressed her hand, and put it back upon the reins with a sigh he could not restrain.

He began to talk with a forced cheerfulness of their coming journey—of the French milieu to which she was going. Hester answered in monosyllables, every now and then—he thought—choking back a sob. And again and again the discouraging thought struck through him—"Has this fellow touched her heart?"—so strong was the impression of an emerging soul and a developing personality.

Suddenly through the dispersing trees a light figure came hurriedly toward them. It was Alice Puttenham.

She was pale and weary, and when she saw Hester, with Meynell beside her, she gave a little cry. But Meynell, standing behind Hester, put his finger on his lips, and she controlled herself. Hester greeted her without any sign of emotion; and the three went homeward along the misty ways of the park. The sun had been swallowed up by rising fog; all colour had been sucked out of the leaves and the heather, even from the golden glades of fern. Only Hester's hair, and her white dress as she passed along, uplifted, made of her a kind of luminous wraith, and beside her, like the supports of an altar-piece, moved the two pensive figures of Meynell and Alice.

From a covert of thorn in the park, a youth who had retreated into its shelter on their approach watched them with malicious eyes. Another man was with him—a sheepish, red-faced person, who peered curiously at the little procession as it passed about a hundred yards away.

"Quite a family party!" said Maurice Barron with a laugh.

* * * * *

In the late evening Meynell returned to the Rectory a wearied man, but with hours of occupation and correspondence still before him. He had left Hester with Alice Puttenham, in a state which Meynell interpreted as at once alarming and hopeful; alarming because it suggested that there might be an element of passion in what had seemed to be a mere escapade dictated by vanity and temper; and hopeful because of the emotion the girl had once or twice betrayed, for the first time in the experience of any one connected with her. When they entered Alice Puttenham's drawing-room, for instance—for Hester had stipulated she was not to be taken home—Alice had thrown her arms round her, and Hester had broken suddenly into crying, a thing unheard of. Meynell of course had hastily disappeared.

Since then the parish had taken its toll. Visits to two or three sick people had been paid. The Rector had looked in at the schools, where a children's evening was going on, and had told the story of Aladdin with riotous success; he had taken off his coat to help in putting up decorations for an entertainment in the little Wesleyan meeting-house of corrugated iron; the parish nurse had waylaid him with reports, and he had dashed into the back parlour of a small embarrassed tradesman, in mortal fear of collapse and bankruptcy, with the offer of a loan, sternly conditional upon facing the facts, and getting in an auditor. Lady Fox-Wilton of course had been seen, and the clamour of her most unattractive offspring allayed as much as possible. And now, emerging from this tangle of personal claims and small interests, in the silence and freedom of the night hours, Meynell was free to give himself once more to the intellectual and spiritual passion of the Reform Movement. His table was piled with unopened letters; on his desk lay a half-written article, and two or three foreign books, the latest products of the Modernist Movement abroad. His crowded be-littered room smiled upon him, as he shut its door upon the outer world. For within it, he lived more truly, more vividly, than anywhere else; and all the more since its threadbare carpet had been trodden by Mary Elsmere.

Yet as he settled himself by the fire with his pipe and his letters for half an hour's ease before going to his desk, his thoughts were still full of Hester. The incurable optimism, the ready faith where his affections were concerned, which were such strong notes of his character, was busy persuading him that all would be well. At last, between them, they had made an impression on the poor child; and as for Philip, he should be dealt with this time with a proper disregard of either his own or his servants' lying. Hester was now to spend some months with a charming and cultivated French family. Plenty of occupation, plenty of amusement, plenty of appeal to her intelligence. Then, perhaps, travel for a couple of years, with Aunt Alice—as much separation as possible, anyway, from the Northleigh family and house. Alice was not rich, but she could manage as much as that, if he advised it, and he would advise it. Then with her twenty-first year, if Stephen or any other wooer were to the fore, the crisis must be faced, and the child must know! and it would be a cold-blooded lover that would weigh her story against her face.

Comfort himself as he would, however, dream as he would, Meynell's conscience was always sore for Hester. Had they done right?—or hideously wrong? Had not all their devices been a mere trifling with nature—a mere attempt to "bind the courses of Orion," with the inevitable result in Hester's unhappy childhood and perverse youth?

The Rector as he pulled at his pipe could still feel the fluttering of her slender hand in his. The recollection stirred in him again all the intolerable pity, the tragic horror of the past. Poor, poor little girl. But she should be happy yet, "with rings on her fingers," and everything proper!

Then from this fatherly and tender preoccupation he passed into a more intimate and poignant dreaming. Mary!—in the moonlight, under the autumn trees, was the vision that held him; varied sometimes by the dream of her in that very room, sitting ghostly in the chair beside him, her lovely eyes wandering over its confusion of books and papers. He thought of her exquisite neatness of dress and delicacy of movement, and smiled happily to himself. "How she must have wanted to tidy up!" And he dared to think of a day when she would come and take possession of him altogether—books, body and soul, and gently order his life….

"Why, you rascals!"—he said, jealously, to the dogs—"she fed you—I know she did—she patted and pampered you, eh, didn't she? She likes dogs—you may thank your lucky stars she does!"

But they only raised their eager heads, and turned their loving eyes upon him, prepared to let loose pandemonium as soon as he showed signs of moving.

"Well, you don't expect me to take you out for a walk at ten o'clock at night, do you?—idiots!" he hurled at them reprovingly; and after another moment of bright-eyed interrogation, disappointment descended, and down went their noses on their paws again.

* * * * *

His trust in the tender steadfastness of Mary's character made itself powerfully felt in these solitary moments. She knew that while these strenuous days were on he could allow himself no personal aims. But the growing knowledge that he was approved by a soul so pure and so devout had both strung up all his powers and calmed the fevers of battle. He loved his cause the more because it was ever more clear to him that she passionately loved it too. And sensitive and depressed as he often was—the penalty of the optimist—her faith in him had doubled his faith in himself.

There was a singular pleasure also in the link his love for her had forged between himself and Elsmere—the dead leader of an earlier generation. "Latitudinarianism is coming in upon us like a flood!"—cried the Church Times, wringing its hands. In other words, thought Meynell, "a New Learning is at last penetrating the minds and consciences of men—in the Church, no less than out of it." And Elsmere had been one of its martyrs. Meynell thought with emotion of the emaciated form he had last seen in the thronged hall of the New Brotherhood. "Our venture is possible—because you suffered," he would say to himself, addressing not so much Elsmere, as Elsmere's generation, remembering its struggles, its thwarted hopes, and starved lives.

And Elsmere's wife?—that rigid, pathetic figure, who, before he knew her in the flesh, had been to him, through the reports of many friends, a kind of legendary presence—the embodiment of the Old Faith. Meynell only knew that as far as he was concerned something had happened—something which he could not define. She was no longer his enemy; and he blessed her humbly in his heart. He thought also, with a curious thankfulness, of her strong and immovable convictions. Each thinking mind, as it were, carries within it its own Pageant of the Universe, and lights the show with its own passion. Not to quench the existing light in any human breast—but to kindle and quicken where no light is: to bring forever new lamp-bearers into the Lampadephoria of life, and marshal them there in their places, on equal terms with the old, neither excluded, nor excluding: this, surely this was the ideal of Modernism.

Elsmere's widow might never admit his own claim to equal rights within the Christian society. What matter! It seemed to him that in some mysterious way she had now recognized the spiritual necessity laid upon him to fight for that claim; had admitted him, so to speak, to the rights of a belligerent. And that had made all the difference.

He did not know how it had happened. But he was strangely certain that it had happened.

But soon the short interval of rest and dream he had allowed himself was over. He turned to his writing-table.

What a medley of letters! Here was one from a clergyman in the Midlands:

"We introduced the new Liturgy last Sunday, and I cannot describe the emotion, the stirring of all the dead-bones it has brought about. There has been of course a secession; but the church at Patten End amply provides for the seceders, and among our own people one seems to realize at last something of what the simplicity and sincerity of the first Christian feeling must have been! No 'allowances' to make for scandalous mistranslations and misquotations—no foolish legends, or unedifying tales of barbarous people—no cursing psalms—no old Semitic nonsense about God resting on the seventh day, delivered in the solemn sing-song which makes it not only nonsense but hypocrisy….

"I have held both a marriage and a funeral this week under the new service-book. I think that all persons accustomed to think of what they are saying felt the strangest delight and relief in the disappearance of the old marriage service. It was like the dropping of a weight to which our shoulders had become so accustomed that we hardly realized it till it was gone. Instead of pompous and futile absurdity—as in the existing exhortation, and homily—beautiful and fitting quotation from the unused treasures of the Bible. Instead of the brutal speech, the crudely physical outlook of an earlier day, the just reticence and nobler perceptions of our own, combined with perfectly plain and tender statement as to the founding of the home and the family. Instead of besmirching bits of primitive and ugly legend like the solemn introduction of Adam's rib into the prayers, a few new prayers of great beauty—some day you must tell me who wrote them, for I suppose you know? (and, by the way, why should we not write as good prayers, to-day, as in any age of the Christian Church?). Instead of the old 'obey,' for the woman, which has had such a definitely debasing effect, as I believe, on the position of women, especially in the working classes—a formula, only slightly altered, but the same for the man and the woman….

"In short, a seemly, and beautiful, and moving thing, instead of a ceremony which in spite of its few fine, even majestic, elements, had become an offence and a scandal. All the fine elements have been kept, and only the scandal amended. Why was it not done long ago?

"Then as to the burial service. The Corinthian chapter stripped of its arguments which are dead, and confined to its cries of poetry and faith which are immortal, made a new and thrilling impression. I confess I thought I should have broken my heart over the omission of 'I know that my Redeemer liveth'—and yet now that it is gone, there is a sense of moral exhilaration in having let it go! One knew all the time that whoever wrote the poem of Job neither said what he was made to say in the famous passage, nor meant what he was supposed to mean. One was perfectly aware, from one's Oxford days, as the choir chanted the great words, that they were a flagrant mistranslation of a corrupt and probably interpolated passage. And yet the glory of Handel's music, the glamour of association overcame one. But now that it is cut ruthlessly away from those moments in life when man can least afford any make-believe with himself or his fellows—now that music alone declaims and fathers it—there is the strangest relief! One feels, as I have said, the joy that comes from something difficult and righteous done—in spite of everything!

"I could go on for hours telling you these very simple and obvious things which must be so familiar to you. To me the amazement of this Movement is that it has taken so long to come. We have groaned under the oppression of what we have now thrown off, so long and so hopelessly; the Revision that the High Churchmen made such a bother about a few years ago came to so little; that now, to see this thing spreading like a great spring-tide over the face of England is marvellous indeed! And when one knows what it means—no mere liturgical change, no mere lopping off here and changing there, but a transformation of the root ideas of Christianity; a transference of its whole proof and evidence from the outward to the inward field, and therewith the uprush of a certainty and joy unknown to our modern life; one can but bow one's head, as those that hear mysterious voices on the wind.

"For so into the temple of man's spirit, age by age, comes the renewing Master of man's life—and makes His tabernacle with man. 'Lift up your heads, O ye gates, and be ye lift up, ye everlasting doors, And the King of Glory shall come in.'"

Meynell bowed his head upon his hands. The pulse of hope and passion in the letter was almost overpowering. It came, he knew, from an elderly man, broken by many troubles, and tormented by arthritis, yet a true saint, and at times a great preacher.

The next letter he opened came from a priest in the diocese of Aix….

"The effect of the various encyclicals and of the ill-advised attempt to make both clergy and laity sign the Modernist decrees has had a prodigious effect all over France—precisely in the opposite sense to that desired by Pius X. The spread of the Movement is really amazing. Fifteen years ago I remember hearing a French critic say—Edmond Scherer, I think, the successor of Sainte Beuve—'The Catholics have not a single intellectual of any eminence—and it is a misfortune for us, the liberals. We have nothing to fight—we seem to be beating the air.'

"Scherer could not have said this to-day. There are Catholics everywhere—in the University, the Ecole Normale, the front ranks of literature. But with few exceptions they are all Modernist; they have thrown overboard the whole fatras of legend and tradition. Christianity has become to them a symbolical and spiritual religion; not only personally important and efficacious, but of enormous significance from the national point of view. But as you know, we do not at present aspire to outward or ceremonial changes. We are quite content to leaven the meal from within; to uphold the absolute right and necessity of the two languages in Christianity—the popular and the scientific, the mythological and the mystical. If the Pope could have his way, Catholicism would soon be at an end—except as a peasant-cult—in the Latin countries. But, thank God, he will not have his way. One hears of a Modernist freemasonry among the Italian clergy—of a secret press—an enthusiasm, like that of the Carboneria in the forties. So the spirit of the Most High blows among the dead clods of the world—and, in a moment the harvest is there!"

* * * * *

Meynell let the paper drop. He began to write, and he wrote without stopping with great ease and inspiration for nearly two hours. Then as midnight struck, he put down his pen, and gazed into the dying fire. He felt as Wordsworth's skater felt on Esthwaite, when, at a sudden pause, the mountains and cliffs seemed to whirl past him in a vast headlong procession. So it was in Meynell's mind with thoughts and ideas. Gradually they calmed and slackened, till at last they passed into an abstraction and ecstasy of prayer.

When he rose, the night had grown very cold. He hurriedly put his papers in order, before going to bed, and as he did so, he perceived two unopened letters which had been overlooked.

One was from Hugh Flaxman, communicating the news of the loss of two valuable gold coins from the collection exhibited at the party. "We are all in tribulation. I wonder whether you can remember seeing them when you were talking there with Norham? One was a gold stater of Velia with a head of Athene."…

The other letter was addressed in Henry Barron's handwriting. Meynell looked at it in some surprise as he opened it, for there had been no communication between him and the White House for a long time.

"I should be glad if you could make it convenient to see me to-morrow morning. I wish to speak with you on a personal matter of some importance—of which I do not think you should remain in ignorance. Will it suit you if I come at eleven?"

Meynell stood motionless. But the mind reacted in a flash. He thought—

"Now I shall know what she told him in those two hours!"