He sat on a thyme-covered hummock by the valley stream, with knees drawn up and palms pressed against his aching head:  sat as he had been sitting for half an hour past, a shovel beside him and an empty sack, which he had brought down to fill with clean river-sand.  A chaffinch, fresh from his bath, flitted incessantly between the rail of the footbridge, a dozen yards below, and the boughs of a tamarisk beside it.  He paid no attention to Parson Jack.  Few living creatures ever did.

Even his parishioners—­those who knew of it—­felt no great concern that Parson Jack had been drunk again last night.  There was no harm in the man.  “He had this failing, to be sure:  with a little liquor he talked silly, though not so silly as you might suppose.  Let him alone, and he’ll find his way home somehow.  Scandalous?  Oh, no doubt!  But you might easily go farther and find a worse parson than Flood.”

It never occurred to them that he felt any special remorse.  His agonies were private, and his chance of redemption lay in this, that they neither ceased nor eased with time; perhaps in this, too, that he wasted no breath in apologetics or self-pity, but blamed himself squarely like a man.

Yet a sentimentalist in his place might have run up a long and tearful account against Providence, fate, circumstances—­whatever sentimentalists choose to arraign rather than themselves.  Five-and-twenty years before, Jack Flood had been a rowdy undergraduate of Brasenose College, Oxford; in his third year of residence, with more than a fair prospect of being ploughed—­or, in the language of that generation, “plucked”—­at the end of it; a member of the Phoenix Wine Club, owner of a brute which he not only called a “hunter” but made to do duty for one at least twice a week; and debtor among various Oxford tradesmen to the tune of something like 500 pounds.  At this point his father—­a Berkshire rector—­died suddenly of a paralytic stroke, leaving Jack and his elder brother Lionel (then abroad in the new Indian Civil Service) to realise and divide an estate of 1200 pounds.

Six hundred pounds is a fair equipment for starting a young man in life; but not when he already owes five hundred, and has few brains, no decided bent, and only a little of the most useless learning.  Jack surrendered two-thirds of his patrimony to his pressing creditors, sold his hunter, read hard for a term, scrambled into his degree, and was received, a month or two later, into Holy Orders.  His father had sent him to Brasenose College as a step to this, and Jack had looked forward to being a parson some day—­a sporting parson, be it understood.

For the moment, however, he was almost penniless; and he had answered in vain some dozen advertisements of curacies, when a college friend came to the rescue and prevailed on a distant kinsman to offer him the living of Langona, with a net annual stipend of 51 pounds eighteen shillings and sixpence.  There are such “livings.”