‘Ah, but I have arranged otherwise,’ we take a step backwards.  He knocks daily, hourly, momently, at the door, and when we have once opened, and He is entered, we have no desire again but to do His will to the uttermost.”  He was silent for a moment, his eyes in-dwelling upon some secret thought; then he said, “Everything about you, your books, your dear wife, your words, your face, tell me that you are very near indeed to the way—­a step or two, and you are free!” He sate back for a moment, as though exhausted, and then said:  “You will forgive me for speaking so frankly, but I feel from hour to hour how short my time may be; and I had no doubt when I saw you, even before I saw you, that I should have some message to give you, some tidings of hope and patience.”

I despair, as I write, of giving any idea of the impressiveness of the old man; now that I have written down his talk, it seems abrupt and even strained.  It was neither.  The perfect naturalness and tranquillity of it all, the fatherly smile, the little gestures of his frail hand, interpreted and filled up the gaps, till I felt as though I had known him all my life, and that he was to me as a dear father, who saw my needs, and even loved me for what I was not and for what I might be.

At this point Miss ——­ came in, and led me away.  As Maud and I walked back, we spoke to each other of what we had seen and heard.  He had talked to her, she said, very simply about Alec.  “I don’t know how it was,” she added, “but I found myself telling him everything that was in my mind and heart, and it seemed as though he knew it all before.”  “Yes, indeed,” I said, “he made me desire with all my heart to be different—­and yet that is not true either, because he made me wish not to be something outside of myself, but something inside, something that was there all the time:  I seem never to have suspected what religion was before; it had always seemed to me a thing that one put on and wore, like a garment; but now it seems to me to be the most natural, simple, and beautiful thing in the world; to consist in being oneself, in fact.”  “Yes, that is exactly it,” said Maud, “I could not have put it into words, but that is how I feel.”  “Yes,” I said, “I saw, in a flash, that life is not a series of things that happen to us, but our very selves.  It is not a question of obeying, and doing, and acting, but a question of being.  Well, it has been a wonderful experience; and yet he told me nothing that I did not know.  God in us, not God with us.”  And presently I added:  “If I were never to see Mr. ——­ again, I should feel he had somehow done more for me than a hundred conversations and a thousand books.  It was like the falling of the spirit at Pentecost.”

That strange sense of an uplifted freedom, of willing co-operation has dwelt with me, with us both, for many days.  I dare not say that life has become easy; that the cloud has rolled away; that there have not been hours of dismay and dreariness and sorrow.  But it is, I am sure, a turning-point of my life; the way which has led me downwards, deepening and darkening, seems to have reached its lowest point, and to be ascending from the gloom; and all from the words of a simple, frail old man, sitting among his books in a panelled parlour, in a soft, summer afternoon.