“No, dear.  No,” she said soothingly and reassuringly.  “With all these mere boys going to the most dreadful deaths in the trenches, with death, hardship and separation running amok in the world—­”

“One has to do something,” she agreed.

“I know, dear,” he said, “that all this year of doubt and change has been a dreadful year for you.”

“It was stupid of me,” she said, “but I have been so unhappy.  It’s over now—­but I was wretched.  And there was nothing I could say....  I prayed....  It isn’t the poverty I feared ever, but the disgrace.  Now—­I’m happy.  I’m happy again.

“But how far do you come with me?”

“I’m with you.”

“But,” he said, “you are still a churchwoman?”

“I don’t know,” she said.  “I don’t mind.”

He stared at her.

“But I thought always that was what hurt you most, my breach with the church.”

“Things are so different now,” she said.

Her heart dissolved within her into tender possessiveness.  There came flooding into her mind the old phrases of an ancient story:  “Whither thou goest I will go... thy people shall be my people and thy God my God....  The Lord do so to me and more also if aught but death part thee and me.”

Just those words would Lady Ella have said to her husband now, but she was capable of no such rhetoric.

“Whither thou goest,” she whispered almost inaudibly, and she could get no further.  “My dear,” she said.

(18)

At two o’clock the next morning Scrope was still up.  He was sitting over the snoring gas fire in his study.  He did not want to go to bed.  His mind was too excited, he knew, for any hope of sleep.  In the last twelve hours, since he had gone out across the park to his momentous talk with Lady Sunderbund, it seemed to him that his life had passed through its cardinal crisis and come to its crown and decision.  The spiritual voyage that had begun five years ago amidst a stormy succession of theological nightmares had reached harbour at last.  He was established now in the sure conviction of God’s reality, and of his advent to unify the lives of men and to save mankind.  Some unobserved process in his mind had perfected that conviction, behind the cloudy veil of his vacillations and moods.  Surely that work was finished now, and the day’s experience had drawn the veil and discovered God established for ever.

He contrasted this simple and overruling knowledge of God as the supreme fact in a practical world with that vague and ineffective subject for sentiment who had been the “God” of his Anglican days.  Some theologian once spoke of God as “the friend behind phenomena”; that Anglican deity had been rather a vague flummery behind court and society, wealth, “respectability,” and the comfortable life.  And even while he had lived in lipservice to that complaisant compromise, this true God had been here, this God he now certainly professed, waiting for his allegiance, waiting to take up the kingship of this distraught and bloodstained earth.  The finding of God is but the stripping of bandages from the eyes.  Seek and ye shall find....