“Thanks,” said the young man; “I wish I could learn the gentle art of sending people away without offending them.”

“They didn’t include that in the curriculum at Oxford?” The tone was not quite kind; neither was the snort with which the remark was concluded.  It was no sauce to the lumpy, greasy mutton that Mark was struggling to eat.  Suddenly he caught the eye of the second curate, Father Marny, who had conceived a great affection for him, and he smiled merrily with a school-boy’s sense of mischief.

CHAPTER XVII

THE BLIND CANON

In a small room in a small house in a small street in Chelsea, Father Molyneux was sitting with a friend.  There were a few beautiful things in the room, and a few well-bound books; but they had a dusty, uncared for look about them.  It teased the young priest to see a medicine bottle and a half-washed medicine glass standing on a bracket with an exquisite statuette of the Madonna.  The present occupier of these lodgings had had very true artistic perceptions before he had become blind.

Mark Molyneux had just been reading to him for an hour, and he now put down the book.  The old man smacked his lips with enjoyment.  The author was new to him, but he had won his admiration at the first reading.

“What people call his paradoxes,” he said, “is his almost despairing attempt at making people pay attention; he has to shout to men who are too hurried to stop.  The danger is that, as time goes on, he will only be able to think in contrasts and to pursue contradictions.”

The speaker paused, and then, his white fingers groped a little as if he were feeling after something.  His voice was rich and low.  Then he kept still, and waited with a curious look of acquired patience.  At last, the younger man began.

“I want to ask your advice, or rather, I want to tell you something I have decided on.”

“And you only want me to agree,” laughed Canon Nicholls, and the blind face seemed full of perception.

“Well, I think you will.”  The boyish voice was bright and keen.  “I’ve come to tell you that I want to be a monk.”

“Tut, tut,” said Canon Nicholls, and then they both laughed together.  “Since when?” he asked a moment later.

“It has been coming by degrees,” said Mark, in a low voice.  “I want to be altogether for God.”

“And why can’t you be that now?”

“It’s too confusing,” he said; “half the day I am amused or worried or tired.  I’ve got next to no spiritual life.”

Canon Nicholls did not help him to say more.

“I can’t be regular in anything, and now there’s the preaching.”

“What’s the matter with that?”

“Who was it who said that a popular preacher could not save his soul? 
Father Rector says that it’s very bad for me that I crowd up the church. 
He is evidently anxious about me.”