“Granted, if it were God’s will that you should lead the life of contemplation, but I don’t believe it is.  I don’t see what right you’ve got to believe it is.  As to not living altogether for God here, that’s His affair.  Mind you, I don’t undervalue the difficulties, and it’s uncommon hard to human nature.  Don’t think too much of other people’s opinions; I know you feel a bit out of it with the priests about you.  They are rough to young men like you—­it’s jealousy, if they only knew it.  Jealousy is the fault of the best men, because they never suspect themselves of it.  If they saw it, they would fight it.  Face facts.  You have some gifts; you will be much humbler if you thank God for them instead of trying to think you haven’t got them.  And be quite particularly nice to the growler sort of priest; he’s had a hard time and, lived a hard life; much harder than the life of a monk.  Mind you respect his scars.”

He talked on, partly to give Mark time; he saw he had given him a shock.

“Mind,” he said, “there is sometimes an acute personal temptation, but you’ve not got that now.  You’ve got a sort of perception of what it might be.  It won’t be unbearable.”  He crossed his legs and put the long, white fingers into each other.  “But I’m old now, and it’s my experience that the mischief for all priests is to let society be their fun.  It ought to be a duty, and a very tiresome duty too.  Take your amusements in any other way, and go out to lunch in the same state of mind as you visit a hospital.  Do you think the best women, whether Protestant or Catholic, think society their fun?  They may like it or not, but it is a serious duty to them.”

Mark sprang up suddenly.  “I can’t stand this!” he said.  “You go on talking, and I want to be a Carthusian, and I will be one.”  He laughed; his voice was troubled and the clear joy of his face was clouded.

Canon Nicholls felt in his pocket for a snuff-box, and brought it out.  “Go along, if you can’t stand it.  And don’t come back till you’ve seen through the devil’s trick.  I don’t mind what I bet that you won’t run away.”

Left alone, Canon Nicholls covered his blind eyes with his hands and heaved a deep sigh.

The man who had just left him was the object of his keenest affection, the apple of those blind eyes that craved to look upon his face.  But his love was not blind, and he felt the danger there lay in the seeming perfectness of the young man.  Mark’s nature was gloriously sweet and abounding in the higher gifts; his love of God had the awe of a little child, and his love of men had the tenderness of a shepherd towards his lost sheep.  Mark had loved life and learning, had revelled in Oxford, and would, in one sense, be an undergraduate all his days.  He had known dreams of ambition, and visions of success in working for his country.  Then gently—­not with any shock—­had come the vocation to the priesthood, and so tenderly had the tendrils that attached him to a man’s life in the world been loosened, that the process hardly seemed to have hurt any of the sensitive sympathies and interests he had always enjoyed.  Even in the matter of giving up great possessions, all had come so gradually as to seem most natural and least strained.