Esther’s face and to say for her many Paternosters and Aves.  At first he thought that he was praying in a silence of nature; but presently the awkwardness of his position began to affect his concentration, and he found that he was saying the words mechanically, listening the while to the voices of birds.  He compelled his attention to the prayers; but the birds were too loud.  The Paternosters and the Aves were absorbed in their singing and chirping and twittering, so that Mark gave up to them and wished for a rosary to help his feeble attention.  Yet could he have used a rosary without falling out of the yew-tree?  He took his hands from the bough for a moment and nearly overbalanced. Make not your rosary of yew berries, he found himself saying.  Who wrote that? Make not your rosary of yew berries. Why, of course, it was Keats.  It was the first line of the Ode to Melancholy.  Esther was still kneeling out there in the sunlight.  And how did the poem continue? Make not your rosary of yew berries. What was the second line?  It was ridiculous to sit astride a bough and say Paternosters and Aves.  He could not sit there much longer.  And then just as he was on the point of letting go he saw that Esther had risen from her knees and that Will Starling was standing in the doorway of the chapel looking at her, not speaking but waiting for her to speak, while he wound a strand of ivy round his fingers and unwound it again, and wound it round again until it broke and he was saying: 

“I thought we agreed after your last display here that you’d give this cursed chapel the go by?”

“I can’t escape from it,” Esther cried.  “You don’t understand, Will, what it means.  You never have understood.”

“Dearest Essie, I understand only too well.  I’ve paid pretty handsomely in having to listen to reproaches, in having to dry your tears and stop your sighs with kisses.  Your damned religion is a joke.  Can’t you grasp that?  It’s not my fault we can’t get married.  If I were really the scoundrel you torment yourself into thinking I am, I would have married and taken the risk of my strumpet of a wife turning up.  But I’ve treated you honestly, Essie.  I can’t help loving you.  I went away once.  I went away again.  And a third time I went just to relieve your soul of the sin of loving me.  But I’m sick of suffering for the sake of a myth, a superstition.”

Esther had moved close to him, and now she put a hand upon his arm.

“To you, Will.  Not to me.”

“Look here, Essie,” said her lover.  “If you knew that you were liable to these dreadful attacks of remorse and penitence, why did you ever encourage me?”

“How dare you say I encouraged you?”

“Now don’t let your religion make you dishonest,” he stabbed.  “No man seduces a woman of your character without as much goodwill as deserves to be called encouragement, and by God is encouragement,” he went on furiously.  “Let’s cut away some of the cant before we begin arguing again about religion.”