freedom from decay to the interposition of God.  To Mark’s imagination, fixed upon the images while Esther wandered solitary in the field beyond the chapel, there was granted another of those moments of vision which marked like milestones his spiritual progress.  He became suddenly assured that he would neither marry nor beget children.  He was astonished to find himself in the grip of this thought, for his mind had never until this evening occupied itself with marriage or children, nor even with love.  Yet here he was obsessed by the conviction of his finite purpose in the scheme of the world.  He could not, he said to himself, be considered credulous if he sought for the explanation of his state of mind in the images of the two Maries.  He looked at them resolved to illuminate with reason’s eye the fluttering shadows of dusk that gave to the stone an illusion of life’s bloom.

“Did their lips really move?” he asked aloud, and from the field beyond the black cow lowed a melancholy negative.  Whether the stone had spoken or not, Mark accepted the revelation of his future as a Divine favour, and thenceforth he regarded the ruined chapel of Wych Maries as the place where the vow he made on that Whit-sunday was accepted by God.

“Aren’t you ever coming?” the voice of Esther called across the field, and Mark hurried away to rejoin her on the grassgrown drive that led round the cedar grove to Rushbrooke Grange.

“It’s too late now to go inside,” he objected.

They were standing before the house.

“It’s not too late at all,” she contradicted eagerly.  “Down here it seems later than it really is.”

Rushbrooke Grange lacked the architectural perfection of the average Cotswold manor.  Being a one-storied building it occupied a large superficial area, and its tumbling irregular roofs of freestone, the outlines of which were blurred by the encroaching mist of vegetation that overhung them, gave the effect of water, as if the atmosphere of this dank valley had wrought upon the substance of the building and as if the architects themselves had been confused by the rivalry of the trees by which it was surrounded.  The owners of Rushbrooke Grange had never occupied a prominent position in the county, and their estates had grown smaller with each succeeding generation.  There was no conspicuous author of their decay, no outstanding gamester or libertine from whose ownership the family’s ruin could be dated.  There was indeed nothing of interest in their annals except an attack upon the Grange by a party of armed burglars in the disorderly times at the beginning of the nineteenth century, when the squire’s wife and two little girls were murdered while the squire and his sons were drinking deep in the Stag Inn at Wychford four miles away.  Mark did not feel much inclined to blunt his impression of the chapel by perambulating Rushbrooke Grange under the guidance of Mrs. Honeybone, the old housekeeper; but Esther perversely insisted upon seeing the garden at any rate, giving as her excuse that the Rector would like them to pay the visit.  By now it was a pink and green May dusk; the air was plumy with moths’ wings, heavy with the scent of apple blossom.