Alick, ceasing to make a confidante of his mother, began to make a friend of Mr. Gryce.  Perhaps it ought rather to be said that Mr. Gryce began to make a friend of him.  The old philosopher, with that corkscrew mind of his, knew well enough what was amiss with the poor lank-visaged curate.  Being of the order of the benevolent busybodies fond of playing Providence, how mole-like soever his method, he had marked out a little plan of his own by which he thought he could make all the crooked roads run straight and discord flow into harmony.  But he too fell into the mistake common to busybodies, benevolent and otherwise—­treating souls as if they were machines to be wound up and kept going by the clockwork of an extraneous will and neatly manipulated by well-arranged circumstance.

One day he joined Alick in his walk to an outlying cottage of the parish, where the husband was sick and the wife and children short of food, and the Church sent its prayer-book and ministers as the best substitute it knew for a wholesome dwelling and sufficient wages.  Theology was not much in the way of an old heathen who reduced all religions save Mohammedanism to the transmuted presentation of the archaic solar myth, and who thought Buddhism far ahead of every other creed; but he liked the man Alick, if the parson bored him, and he was caressing a plan which he had in his pocket.

“You find your life here satisfying, I suppose?” he began, his blue eyes looking into the wayside banks for creatures.

“Is any life?” answered Alick, his eyes turned to the vague distance.

“Not fully:  the spirit of progress, working by discontent, forbids the social stagnation of rest and thankfulness; but we can come to something that suffices for our daily wants if it does not satisfy all our longings.  Work in harmony with our nature, and doing good here and there when we can, both these help us on.  But the work must be harmonious and the good we do manifest.”

“So far as that goes, Church-work is pleasant to me—­all, indeed, I care for or am fit for; but North Aston is stony ground,” said Alick.

“Can you wonder?  When the husbandman-in-chief is such a man as Mr. Birkett, you must make your account with stones and weeds.  The spiritual cannot flourish under the hand of the unspiritual; and, considering the pastor, the flock is far from bad.”

“That may be, but we do not like to live only in comparatives,” said Alick.  “I confess I should be happier in a cure where I was more of one mind with my rector than I am here, and not decried or ridiculed on account of every scheme for good that I might propose.  Parish-work here is shamefully neglected, but Mr. Birkett will not let me do anything to mend it.”

“Ah!” said Mr. Gryce, catching a luckless curculio by the way, “that is bad.  A more harmonious one would certainly be, as you say, far more agreeable.  Or a little parish of your own—­a parish, however small, which would be all your own, and you not under the control of any one below your diocesan?  How would that do?  That would be my affair if I were in the Church.”