The moment his visitor had vanished, Pierson paced up and down the study, with anger rising in his, heart.  His daughter or his parish!  The old saw, “An Englishman’s house is his castle!” was being attacked within him.  Must he not then harbour his own daughter, and help her by candid atonement to regain her inward strength and peace?  Was he not thereby acting as a true Christian, in by far the hardest course he and she could pursue?  To go back on that decision and imperil his daughter’s spirit, or else resign his parish—­the alternatives were brutal!  This was the centre of his world, the only spot where so lonely a man could hope to feel even the semblance of home; a thousand little threads tethered him to his church, his parishioners, and this house—­for, to live on here if he gave up his church was out of the question.  But his chief feeling was a bewildered anger that for doing what seemed to him his duty, he should be attacked by his parishioners.

A passion of desire to know what they really thought and felt—­these parishioners of his, whom he had befriended, and for whom he had worked so long—­beset him now, and he went out.  But the absurdity of his quest struck him before he had gone the length of the Square.  One could not go to people and say:  “Stand and deliver me your inmost judgments.”  And suddenly he was aware of how far away he really was from them.  Through all his ministrations had he ever come to know their hearts?  And now, in this dire necessity for knowledge, there seemed no way of getting it.  He went at random into a stationer’s shop; the shopman sang bass in his choir.  They had met Sunday after Sunday for the last seven years.  But when, with this itch for intimate knowledge on him, he saw the man behind the counter, it was as if he were looking on him for the first time.  The Russian proverb, “The heart of another is a dark forest,” gashed into his mind, while he said: 

“Well, Hodson, what news of your son?”

“Nothing more, Mr. Pierson, thank you, sir, nothing more at present.”

And it seemed to Pierson, gazing at the man’s face clothed in a short, grizzling beard cut rather like his own, that he must be thinking:  ’Ah! sir, but what news of your daughter?’ No one would ever tell him to his face what he was thinking.  And buying two pencils, he went out.  On the other side of the road was a bird-fancier’s shop, kept by a woman whose husband had been taken for the Army.  She was not friendly towards him, for it was known to her that he had expostulated with her husband for keeping larks, and other wild birds.  And quite deliberately he crossed the road, and stood looking in at the window, with the morbid hope that from this unfriendly one he might hear truth.  She was in her shop, and came to the door.

“Have you any news of your husband, Mrs. Cherry?”

“No, Mr. Pierson, I ’ave not; not this week.”

“He hasn’t gone out yet?”