Mrs. Dixon of course was grieved; it was “sad” to think of a clergyman behaving so shamefully.

“But you know, dear,” she proceeded, “I have been thinking about that unfortunate Taylor boy and his disappointments, and after what you’ve just told me, I am sure it’s some kind of judgment on them both.  Has Mr. Taylor forgotten the vows he took at his ordination?  But don’t you think, dear, I am right, and that he has been punished:  ’The sins of the fathers’?”

Somehow or other Lucian divined the atmosphere of threatenings and judgments, and shrank more and more from the small society of the countryside.  For his part, when he was not “mooning” in the beloved fields and woods of happy memory, he shut himself up with books, reading whatever could be found on the shelves, and amassing a store of incongruous and obsolete knowledge.  Long did he linger with the men of the seventeenth century; delaying the gay sunlit streets with Pepys, and listening to the charmed sound of the Restoration Revel; roaming by peaceful streams with Izaak Walton, and the great Catholic divines; enchanted with the portrait of Herber the loving ascetic; awed by the mystic breath of Crashaw.  Then the cavalier poets sang their gallant songs; and Herrick made Dean Prior magic ground by the holy incantation of a verse.  And in the old proverbs and homely sayings of the time he found the good and beautiful English life, a time full of grace and dignity and rich merriment.  He dived deeper and deeper into his books; he had taken all obsolescence to be his province; in his disgust at the stupid usual questions, “Will it pay?” “What good is it?” and so forth, he would only read what was uncouth and useless.  The strange pomp and symbolism of the Cabala, with its hint of more terrible things; the Rosicrucian mysteries of Fludd, the enigmas of Vaughan, dreams of alchemists—­all these were his delight.  Such were his companions, with the hills and hanging woods, the brooks and lonely waterpools; books, the thoughts of books, the stirrings of imagination, all fused into one phantasy by the magic of the outland country.  He held himself aloof from the walls of the fort; he was content to see the heaped mounds, the violent height with faerie bulwarks, from the gate in the lane, and to leave all within the ring of oaks in the mystery of his boyhood’s vision.  He professed to laugh at himself and at his fancies of that hot August afternoon, when sleep came to him within the thicket, but in his heart of hearts there was something that never faded—­something that glowed like the red glint of a gypsy’s fire seen from afar across the hills and mists of the night, and known to be burning in a wild land.  Sometimes, when he was sunken in his books, the flame of delight shot up, and showed him a whole province and continent of his nature, all shining and aglow; and in the midst of the exultation and triumph he would draw back, a little afraid.  He had become ascetic in his studious and melancholy isolation, and the vision of such ecstasies frightened him.  He began to write a little; at first very tentatively and feebly, and then with more confidence.  He showed some of his verses to his father, who told him with a sigh that he had once hoped to write—­in the old days at Oxford, he added.