It was never allowed to be forgotten at St. Agnes’ that the Mission was the Silchester College Mission; and there were few days in the year on which it was possible to visit the Mission House without finding there some member of the College past or present.  Every Sunday during term two or three prefects would sit down to dinner; masters turned up during the holidays; even the mighty Provost himself paid occasional visits, during which he put off most of his majesty and became as nearly human as a facetious judge.  Nor did Father Rowley allow Silchester to forget that it had a Mission.  He was not at all content with issuing a half yearly report of progress and expenses, and he had no intention of letting St. Agnes’ exist as a subject for an occasional school sermon or a religious tax levied on parents.  From the first moment he had put foot in Chatsea he had done everything he could to make St. Agnes’ be what it was supposed to be—­the Silchester College Mission.  He was particularly anxious that the new church should be built and beautified with money from Silchester sources, even if he also accepted money for this purpose from outside.  Soon after Mark had become recognized as Father Rowley’s confidential secretary, he visited Silchester for the first time in his company.

It was the custom during the summer for the various guilds and clubs connected with the parish to be entertained in turn at the College.  It had never happened that Mark had accompanied any of these outings, which in the early days of St. Agnes’ had been regarded with dread by the College authorities, so many flowers were picked, so much fruit was stolen, but which now were as orderly and respectable excursions as you could wish to see.  Mark’s first visit to Silchester was on the occasion of Father Rowley’s terminal sermon in the June after he was nineteen.  He found the experience intimidating, because he was not yet old enough to have learnt self-confidence and he had never passed through the ordeal either of a first term at a public school or of a first term at the University.  Boys are always critical, and at Silchester with the tradition of six hundred years to give them a corporate self-confidence, the judgment of outsiders is more severe than anywhere in the world, unless it might be in the New Hebrides.  Added to their critical regard was a chilling politeness which would have made downright insolence appear cordial in comparison.  Mark felt like Gulliver in the presence of the Houyhnms.  These noble animals, so graceful, so clean, so condescending, appalled him.  Yet he had found the Silchester men who came to visit the Mission easy enough to get on with.  No doubt they, without their background were themselves a little shy, although their shyness never mastered them so far as to make them ill at ease.  Here, however, they seemed as imperturbable and unbending as the stone saints, row upon row on the great West front of the Cathedral.  Mark apprehended more