“The only thing I feel,” said Mr. Ogilvie, “is that perhaps you are leading too sheltered a life here and that the explanation of your intuition is your soul’s perception of this.  Indeed, once or twice lately I have been on the point of warning you that you must not get into the habit of supposing you will always find the onset of the world so gentle as here.”

“But naturally I don’t expect to,” said Mark.  “I was quite long enough at Haverton House to appreciate what it means to be here.”

“Yes,” the Rector went on, “but even at Haverton House it was a passive ugliness, just as here it is a passive beauty.  After our Lord had fasted forty days in the desert, accumulating reserves of spiritual energy, just as we in our poor human fashion try to accumulate in Lent reserves of spiritual energy that will enable us to celebrate Easter worthily, He was assailed by the Tempter more fiercely than ever during His life on earth.  The history of all the early Egyptian monks, the history indeed of any life lived without losing sight of the way of spiritual perfection displays the same phenomena.  In the action and reaction of experience, in the rise and fall of the tides, in the very breathing of the human lungs, you may perceive analogies of the divine rhythm.  No, I fancy your intuition of this morning is nothing more than one of those movements which warn us that the sleeper will soon wake.”

Mark went away from this conversation with the Rector dissatisfied.  He wanted something more than analogies taken from the experience of spiritual giants, Titans of holiness whose mighty conquests of the flesh seemed as remote from him as the achievements of Alexander might appear to a captain of the local volunteers.  What he had gone to ask the Rector was whether it was blasphemous to suppose that God was going to play a horrible trick on him.  He had not wanted a theological discussion, an academic question and reply.  Anything could be answered like that, probably himself in another twenty years, when he had preached some hundreds of sermons, would talk like that.  Moreover, when he was alone Mark understood that he had not really wanted to talk about his own troubles to the Rector at all, but that his real preoccupation had been and still was Esther.  He wondered, oh, how much he wondered, if her brother had the least suspicion of her friendship with Will Starling, or if Miriam had had the least inkling that Esther had not come in till nine o’clock last night because she had been to Wych Maries?  Mark, remembering those wild eyes and that windblown hair when she stood for a moment framed in the doorway of the Rector’s library, could not believe that none of her family had guessed that something more than the whim to wander over the hills had taken her out on such a night.  Did Mrs. Ogilvie, promenading so placidly along her garden borders, ever pause in perplexity at her daughter’s behaviour?  Calling them all to mind, their attitudes,