We reached the house in the evening, losing our way more than once in our endeavour to discover it.  Two sitting-rooms were furnished, both large airy rooms looking upon the garden, and a bedroom and dressing-room up-stairs, which Arthur and his charge were to occupy.  The housekeeper and her handmaiden, who were to be his servants, were already installed, and had arranged in a certain fashion the new furniture that Arthur had sent down, jostling with the old, and his books.  As we sat, the first evening, with our cigarettes, in the dusk, watching the green sky over the quiet hills, a wonderful sensation of repose seemed to pass into one from the place.  “I feel as if I might be very happy here,” said Arthur, “if I were allowed; and perhaps work out my old idea a little more about the meaning of external things.”

I was to return to London in a day or two, to see about any commission that might have been neglected, and to bring down the boy, who was now daily expected.

In my absence I received the following letter from Arthur.  The serene mood had had its reaction.

“I have told you, I think, of the depressing effect that a new place has on me till I get habituated to it.  There is a constant sense of unrest, just as there is about a new person, that racks the nerves.

“I have been very anxious and ‘heavy’ to-day, as the Psalms have it:  dispirited about the future and the present, and remorseful about the past.  You don’t mind my speaking freely, do you?  I feel so weak and womanish, I must tell some one.  I have no one to lean on here.

“I can’t see what to make of my life, or, rather, what can possibly be made of it.  I have taken hitherto all the rebuffs I have had—­and they have not been few—­as painful steps in an education which was to fit me for something.  I was having, I hoped, experience which was to enable me to sympathize with human beings fully, when I came to speak to them, to teach them, to lead them, as I have all my life believed I some day should.

“You won’t think it conceited if I say this to you, my dear Chris?  I don’t feel to myself as if I was like other people.  I have met several people better and on a higher level than myself, but no one on quite the same level—­no one, to put it shortly, quite so sure as I am.

“Does that explain itself?  I mean that I have for many years been conscious of a kind of inward law that I dare not disobey, and which has constrained me into obedience—­once unwilling, now willing, and even enthusiastic.  In others, it has always seemed to me that there is strife and [Greek:  dipsyxia]—­one great factor pulling one way and one another; but it has never been so with me—­there has never been a serious strain.  I have always known what I meant, and have generally done it; and little by little, as I have lived, comparing this inner presence with what I can see of moral laws, of Divine government, I have come to observe that the two are almost identical, though there are certain variations which I have not yet accounted for.