I don’t wonder he is anxious about me.  What unworthy motives of wilful blindness and arrogance he is attributing to the Nonconformists!  Oh, James, James! will you never see that it is disbelief in the sincerity of the religion of others, because it is not in the same narrow form as your own, which makes all your zeal and earnestness of none effect!  You think the opposition you meet with everywhere is the opposition of evil to good, of indifference to piety.  When will you learn that it is the good in your hearers which opposes you, the love of God in them which is offended by your representation of Him?”

* * * * *

Hugh’s eyes were fixed on the same pillar as Mr. Tristram’s, but if he had been aware of that fact he would have chosen another pillar.  His thin, handsome face was beginning to show the marks of mental strain.  His eyes had the set, impassive look of one who, hedged in on both sides, sees a sharp turn ahead of him on an unknown road.

* * * * *

“Rachel!  Rachel!  Rachel!  Don’t you hear me calling to you?  Don’t you hear me telling you that I can’t live without you?  The hymn was right—­’Other refuge have I none, Hangs my helpless soul on Thee’—­only it was written of you, not of that far, far away God who does not care.  Only care for me.  Only love me.  Only give me those cool hands that I may lean my forehead against them.  No help can come to me except through you.  Stoop down to me and raise me up, for I love you.”

The sun went in suddenly, and a cold shadow fell on the pillar and on Hugh’s heart.

Love and marriage were not for him.  That far-away God, that Judge in the black cap, had pronounced sentence against him, had doomed that he should die in his sins.  When he had sat in his own village church only last Sunday between his mother and sister, he had seen the empty place on his chancel wall where the tablet to his memory would be put up.  When he walked through the church-yard, his mother leaning on his arm, his step regulated by her feeble one, he had seen the vacant space by his father’s grave already filled by the mound of raw earth which would shortly cover him.  His heart had ached for his mother, for the gentle, feeble-minded sister, who had transferred the interest in life, which keeps body and soul together, from her colorless existence to that of her brother.  Hughie was the romance of her gray life:  what Hughie said, what Hughie thought, Hughie’s wife—­oh, jealous thought, only to be met by prayer!  But later on—­joy of joys—­Hughie’s children!  He realized it, now and then, vaguely, momentarily, but never as fully as last Sunday.  He shrank from the remembrance, and his mind wandered anew in the labyrinth of broken, twisted thought, from which he could find no way out.

There must be some way out! He had stumbled callously through one day after another of these weeks in which he had not seen Rachel towards his next meeting with her, as a half-blind man stumbles towards the light.  But the presence of Rachel afforded no clew to the labyrinth.  What vain hope was this that he had cherished unconsciously that she could help him.  There was no help for him.  There was no way out.  He was in a trap.  He must die, and soon, by his own hand.  Incredible, preposterous fate!  He shuddered, and looked around him involuntarily.