Helen, as Lady Sunningdale had mentioned, had to start back again for her Sunday-school soon after lunch. They had all moved out under the cedar on the lawn, and when she arose, Lord Yorkshire also got up and offered himself as an escort. This was perfectly agreeable to the girl, though she wondered exactly how high Aunt Clara’s eyebrows would rise if she knew that her niece might have been found walking on Sunday afternoon with a young man who could not possibly be brought under the elastic bonds of cousinship. But the eyebrows of Lady Sunningdale, who, it must be supposed, was chaperone, remained low and level, and the two started.

Frank had been admirably entertaining in his own way during lunch, capping the extravagancies of Lady Sunningdale with incongruities that rivalled her own, and giving wings of epigram and paradox to his speech; but Helen had received a very distinct impression that under his flippancy, which Martin imitated so faithfully, there lay something of sterling and very human solidity. And this unknown factor interested her quite apart from and much more than his conversational fireworks, which were as obviously superficial to the essential “he” as his eyebrow or moustache. Perhaps he also knew the unimportance of their leadings, for certainly, as soon as they were alone, such coruscations died slowly down, and it seemed to Helen that a very pleasant mellow light, restful after fireworks, took its place.{82}

“I think it is unkind of you not to admit me into the school itself,” he was saying. “Why am I to be debarred from the knowledge of Ur of the Chaldees? Geography has an enormous fascination for me. I can pore for hours over maps of countries which I have never seen and almost certainly shall never see, just reading the names of unheard of places with gusto.”

“Ah, you feel that, too,” she said. “Martin always tells me I am a gypsy. Certainly I want to wander, to go on just for the sake of going on. The exploration, that is the point. And I think it is the playing at exploration that is so fascinating in a map. Dictionaries, too,—new words. And, best of all, new books with new ideas.”

“There is one thing better,” said he; “I cap your new books with new people, new ideas.”

The personal note entered, however slightly, into this, and Helen was silent a moment.

“Ah, but new books implies new people,” she said. “Nothing can be more real than the people in some books.”

“Quite true; and nothing can be less real than some people in real life. Do you know what I mean? One wonders with some people if there is anybody there. My impression is that there often isn’t.”

“I have an aunt——“ Helen began, and stopped, feeling that it was not quite kind to lay Aunt Clara on the dissecting-table.

Frank guessed this.

“Ah, I have three,” he said; “perhaps mine will do.”

Helen laughed, and, after a moment, he went on:

“I believe that curiosity which is a convenient expression{83} to sum up all this passion for the new,” he said, “is quite modern. I don’t think, at least, that the generation to which our aunts belong had it, with certain adorable exceptions, like Lady Sunningdale, anything like to the extent we have it. What was good enough for our grandfathers was nearly good enough for our fathers. But what was good enough for our fathers is not nearly good enough for us.”

She turned a quick, luminous glance at him. He was talking about things that very much concerned her.

“Ah, that is interesting,” she said, eagerly. “Give me more news of that.”

“It has struck you, too?” he asked.

“Your saying it reminds me that I knew it all the time.”

“I know what you mean. Yes, I think it is the case. At any rate, take yourself, Martin, and me,—all, I expect, quite normal people. Well, we all want to wander, to experience everything. We are probably not really afraid of any experience that could conceivably happen to us. And we claim the right to all experience. We claim the right to our own individuality, too. It seems to us quite certainly ours; the only possession we have which is inalienable. We may lose everything else, from our character to our teeth, but not our individuality. Do you remember how Magda throws her arms wide, and cries, ‘Son Io!’—‘I am I’? That somewhat important point had never struck her father or mother. Poor things! They thought she was a sort of them. Is that bad grammar?”

Their way lay at this point through one of the game covers, and a sudden piteous crying, dreadfully human,{84} arose from the bushes near the path. Helen stopped with fright and horror in her face.

“A child—is it a child?” she asked.

“No; nearly as bad though,—a hare,” said he, and pushed his way through tangled bracken and brambles in the direction of the sound. In a moment he called to her.

“Will you come here, Miss Challoner?” he said. “Come round to the right: it is a clearer path.”

She followed his directions, and found him kneeling a few yards off, holding in both hands a hare that was caught by the hind-leg in a horrible jagged-toothed trap.

“Pull the two sides of the trap apart,” he said, “as quickly as you can. Be quick. The poor brute is struggling so I can hardly hold it.”

His voice was so changed that she would hardly have recognised it. It was no longer low and courteous, but sharp and angry. She knelt down by him and, exerting her full strength, did as he bade her. The leg was caught only by the skin, and holding the animal in one hand he gently disimpaled it where the iron teeth had clutched. But just as it was free a sudden tremor of nerves passed through Helen at this humane surgery; the trap slipped from her hand, and caught Frank’s finger just at the base of the nail. He took his breath quickly with the pain and let go of the hare, which, none the worse, ran off up the winding path down which they had come.

“I must trouble you to open the trap once more,” he said, the blood streaming from his finger. But now his voice was quite normal again.

“Oh, I’m an absolute fool,” cried Helen. “Oh,{85} I’m so sorry,” and again she wrenched the trap open.

Frank was rather pale, but he laughed quite naturally.

“Thank you so much,” he said, as she released his finger. “What strong hands you have. But I should dearly like to clap that thing on the nose of the brute who set it. What an infernal contrivance. How can men be such butchers! I shall take it and show it to your uncle.”

He shook the blood off his finger and bound it tightly round with the handkerchief.

“Oh, Lord Yorkshire, I’m so sorry,” said Helen again. “I am an absolute born idiot. How could I be such a fool?”

He laughed again.

“My dear Miss Challoner,” he said, “nothing whatever has happened which can justify your violent language. Besides, it would have been worth while to set that poor, jolly beast free at the cost of real pain, and not just a finger-scratch. Well, we’ve vindicated the liberty of one individual anyhow. Did you see its eyes? They said ‘I am I,’ like Magda.”

He held the bushes back for her to regain the path.

“But you’ll have your finger attended to?” she said.

“Yes, at once, please. I’ll ask you to tie it rather tighter, if you don’t mind the sight of blood. I always think blood is such a beautiful colour,” he chattered on, to prevent her apologising further. “One talks of a blood-red sunset and admires it, and dragon’s-blood china; but when it comes to the real article, so many people shrink from it. That’s better,{86} thanks; that’s excellent. I assure you it is nothing at all.”

His manner was so entirely natural that there was nothing left for her except to be natural too; and they walked on out of the cool, green-shadowed path, flecked here and there with the sunshine that filtered through the trees that met above them, into the blaze and brightness of the fields that bordered the church-yard.

“Yes, the cry of Magda for her right to her own individuality,” he said. “At last this generation has said, ‘I will lead my own life, not the life dictated to me by other people.’ I wonder what we shall make of it.”

Helen looked at him again, eagerly.

“And do you mean that the assertion of one’s own individuality is a duty?” she asked.

“Ah, that is a difficult question. Certainly, I think there are—are indications that one is supposed to play one’s hand for all it’s worth. But duty? Probably you and I mean different things by it.”

“I mean the will of God for me,” she said, simply.

They paused at the gate into the church-yard, and their eyes met. It seemed to Frank that she waited for his answer with some eagerness. And he shook his head.

“No, I don’t mean that,” he said.

She held out her hand to him.

“I’m sorry,” she said.

“So am I, very sorry, indeed. But I can’t help it.”

Her eyes wandered over the woods behind him. Then came back to his face.

“No, I recognise that,” she said. “Good-bye, Lord Yorkshire. Thank you so much for coming with me. And please have your finger attended to.”{87}

She smiled at him and went up the church-yard path towards the shining corrugated-iron Room. As she passed the walk leading to the vicarage, she met her father.

“You are nearly ten minutes late, Helen,” he said.

“I know, dear. I am sorry. But you know you are late, too.”

He did not smile.

“I was detained by other parish work,” he said. “I was not amusing myself. Pray do not delay any longer.”

The evening meal on Sunday at the vicarage was of a strictly Sabbatical order, and consisted of cold things to eat and no waiting on the part of servants. It took place late after evening church and had, to Martin’s mind, a dreariness of its own, an individuality (to which Frank would have said it undoubtedly had a right) which marked it off from all other meals. Every one was fatigued with the exercises of the day, and though they were religious exercises which had produced that fatigue, it brought with it a tendency which made cheeriness difficult. However, cheeriness was not a quality exactly encouraged by Mr. Challoner on Sunday, so perhaps that was all for the good. But this evening, Martin, who had spent the whole afternoon at his uncle’s, coming back only just before supper, was conscious of a Sunday easily got through, and was chattering on with a good deal of rather thoughtless enjoyment about Lady Sunningdale, every now and then mimicking, with extreme fidelity, some more than usually incoherent speech of hers in which Wagner, her dogs, South Italy, her husband, egg-shell china, and scandal were about{88} equal ingredients, without noticing a somewhat ominous gravity that was deepening on his father’s face.

At length Mr. Challoner spoke, interrupting him.

“There, dear Martin, is not that enough? It is Sunday evening, remember. Cannot we find something rather more suitable to the day to talk about? And you would scarcely like Lady Sunningdale, who is so good to you, to know that you imitate her.”

“Oh, she is always insisting that I should do it to her face,” said Martin. “I often do. She shrieks.”

“That is enough, I think, Martin,” said his father again, mindful of their compact of the evening before, and determining to be gentle. “Have you only just come back?”

“Half an hour ago,” said Martin, the gleam in his eye suddenly quenched, for he knew what the next question must be.

“Then, you did not go to church this evening?” asked his father.

“No; I had been twice.”

Now, Mr. Challoner had been from church to Sunday-school and from Sunday-school to church practically since eight that morning, and it not in the least unreasonable that he should be tired with so many busy hours in ill-ventilated places on so hot a day. The effect of this tiredness on him, as on most of us, was shewn in a tendency to that which, when it occurs in children, their elders label “crossness.” And he answered in a tone in which that very common emotion was apparent.

“I was not asking you to justify your absence,” he said, and the meal proceeded in rather dreary silence.

Then two small incidents happened. Martin dropped{89} a plate with a hideous clatter, and a moment afterwards upset a wineglass, which he had just filled with claret, all over the table. He apologised and wiped it up, but, unfortunately, looking up, he saw his father’s face wearing such an extraordinary expression of true Christian patience that for the life of him he could not help giving a sudden giggle of laughter. He could not possibly have helped it; if he was going to be hung for it he must have laughed.

Now, the laughter of other people when we ourselves do not see anything whatever in the situation to provoke mirth is one of the authentic trials of life, especially if one half suspects, as Mr. Challoner did now, that one is in some manner inexplicable to one’s self the cause of it. It was therefore highly to his credit that, remembering the interview he had had with Martin the night before, he could manage to keep inside his lips the words that tingled on his tongue. Of more than that he was incapable; he could not just then be genial or start a subject of conversation, he could only just be silent.

Martin could easily manage that; his last observation had not found favour, and he held his tongue and ate large quantities of cold beef. Helen sitting opposite her father, in the absence of Aunt Clara, who was spending the Sunday away, had also nothing apparently which she considered as suitable, and the meal proceeded in silence. Then, after a long pause, she raised her eyes, which so happened to catch Martin’s, who was still struggling with his unseemly mirth. At this moment also her father looked up and saw a glance which he interpreted into a glance of meaning pass between them, a thing irritating to the most placid{90} temperament. He saw, too, the corners of Martin’s mouth twitching. This was too much.

“I will not have that sort of thing, children,” he said, his voice rising sharply. “It is an extremely rude and vulgar thing to exchange glances like that.”

Martin’s merriment was struck as dead as beech-leaves in frost.

“I was doing nothing of the kind,” he said, his temper flashing out. “Helen looked up at the same moment as I looked up. We all three looked up, in fact. It was purely accidental.”

Helen was vexed that Martin should speak so, but felt bound to endorse him.

“Indeed, father, it is so,” she said.

Again the silence descended, and Martin, seeing that both his father and sister had finished their meat, changed their plates and arranged the second course. After a very long pause their father spoke again.

“I should have thought my children might have had something to say to me in the evening when they have left me alone all day, enjoying themselves elsewhere. Has nothing happened to you since breakfast which I am worthy of hearing?”

Martin’s intolerance of this injustice again stung him into ill-advised speech.

“I tried to tell you what I have been doing,” he said, “but you stopped me. You said it was unsuitable,” and his handsome face flushed angrily.

Then a thing unprecedented happened.

“I beg your pardon, dear Martin,” said his father.

 

Helen was engaged next morning in the fragrant labour of picking sweet-peas, when a maid came out of{91} the house to say that Lord Yorkshire was there. Her father and Martin she knew were both out, and she went in to see him, concealing from herself the quite perceptible thrill of pleasure that the announcement had given her. She was, as usual, hatless, and her hair was in golden disarray from the breeze, and as she went towards the house she took off her gardening gloves, trying by sundry pats and pokes to give it some semblance of order. She was not very successful in this, nor need she have been, for she looked to him like some beautiful wild flower when she entered.

“I ought to apologise for coming at this unearthly hour,” he said, “for my only excuse is that Martin left a book of music at Chartries, and, having an idle morning, I thought I would bring it over.”

Helen was delighted to see him, and since it would have been ungracious to convey the impression that this morning visit was a bore, especially since it was not, she took the straightforward line.

“How good of you,” she said. “And the finger?”

He held up a bandaged hand.

“I am only reminded of it by that,” he said.

“I am so glad. Isn’t it extraordinary that any one could be so awkward as I was. I am always dropping and spilling things. Martin used to say, ‘It is a lovely day, let us go and spill something.’ But he is much worse than I am, really. Do come and look at the garden. It is really pretty.”

“And are you gardening?” he asked, glancing at the gloves.

“Mildly. I am really only picking sweet-peas. It is so nice of them—the more you pick the more they flower.”{92}

She picked up her basket as they walked out and held it up to him.

“How energetic of them,” he said. “Ah, what a delicious smell. That reminds me of lots of nice things. It will now remind me of one nice thing the more. Smell is the keenest of all the senses to remind one of things. Sight and hearing are not nearly so intimate. And Martin is out?”

“Yes; he went to try and get a fish. But there is too much sun.”

“I am delighted to hear it,” said Frank.

“I think I am, too, really,” she said. “But I do like the dear boy to be pleased.”

“Well, I hope we are all going to please him,” said he. “For the combined armies are going to advance and rescue him. Lord Flintshire, Lady Sunningdale, and, in my own humble manner, myself, are all going to try to get your father to allow him to study music in earnest. In fact, I am a sort of skirmisher in advance of the heavy—of the main body. It is my business to bring on the general engagement by asking him to stay with me in London, and bringing some people, who really know, to hear him play.”

Helen turned a radiant face on him.

“Ah, that is good of you,” she said; “and it is really angelic of me to feel that, as I shall be left here all alone.”

“But the scheme includes you. Lady Sunningdale is writing to you to ask you to come up with him and stay with her for a week or two. I hope you will say ‘Yes.’”

Helen gave a long sigh, as Moses, perhaps, sighed on Pisgah.{93}

“I don’t know if I could manage it,” she said, “though it would be heavenly. Perhaps, as Aunt Clara comes back in a day or two, I could leave father. But I don’t know. Oh, I should enjoy it,” she cried.

“I expect you have a very fine faculty for enjoyment,” said he.

Again the personal note entered, but this time it did not make her pause.

“I? I should just think I had. And I love London in little raids like this, it is so full of charming things to do. But Martin,—it is good of you, Lord Yorkshire. And do be very good for him. Do use your influence with him. Do make him, at any rate, work hard to pass his examination at Cambridge first. It would make everything so much easier, so much happier.”

“For him?” he asked, with a marked intonation.

“Yes, and for all of us.”

He looked at her gravely.

“That sounds worth while,” he said.

He let that string vibrate, as it were, for a moment or two, and then passed on.

“But what becomes of the liberty of the individual which we talked of yesterday?” he said. “To influence anybody always seems to me a slight infringement of rights. One imposes one’s personality—such as it is—on another.”

“Ah, but in a good cause, to show him the stupidity of not passing examinations. Surely, that is a rule absolutely without exception, that it is always wise not to be stupid.”

He laughed. Helen, with her direct vivid personality, seemed to him unlike anybody else he had ever{94} seen, with the exception, perhaps, of her twin. The extraordinary and rather rare charm also of perfect naturalness, not the assumption of it, was hers also.

“Well, it is certainly hard to think of any exception to that rule,” he said, “though one always distrusts rules without exceptions. It seems so very unlikely that they should exist, considering how utterly different every one person is from every other. On the face of it, it seems impossible.”

This had aroused another train of thought in the girl.

“Oh, nothing would be impossible, if one were wise,” she said. “Oh, I hate fools. And I am one.”

And she snipped viciously among the sweet-peas.

He followed this with some success.

“Was the Sunday-school very stupid?” he asked, sympathetically.

“Hideously—quite hideously. How clever of you to guess. It was also extremely ugly. I don’t know which I dislike most, ugliness or stupidity. In fact, they are difficult to tell apart. Yet, after all, beauty is only skin deep.”

“But what has that to do with the wonder of it?” he asked. “That particular proverb seems to me about the silliest. Why, the most subtle brain in the world is only a few inches deep, and, as far as measurement goes, it is about the same depth as the most stupid. Or would you say that the beauty of some wonderful evening moment of a Corot was only skin deep, the depth of the paint on the canvas? Surely not. It has all the depth of beauty of the summer night. No, that proverb is perfectly meaningless, and was probably invented by somebody more than usually plain.”{95}

Helen’s basket of sweet-peas was full, and she emerged from the fragrant tangle of the garden-beds and strolled with him up the lawn, her face on flame with what he had called curiosity. That divine moment, when a girl becomes a woman, when all she has drunk in all her life begins to make products of its own had just come to her. And at this psychological moment he had come, too.

“But surely one sees very beautiful people who are very dull, very stupid, very wicked even,” she said. “Is not that what the proverb means, perhaps, that as far as beauty itself goes it is only a very superficial gift?”

He shook his head.

“Look at that splendid Gloire de Dijon,” he said. “It may be very stupid, very dull, very wicked, as far as we know. But that does not concern us. It is beautiful, and its beauty does not, anyhow, touch us only superficially, but very deeply. Does not beauty stir in you some chord of wider vibration than any purely intellectual quality? Some—how shall I say it?—some longing for the infinite?”

Again their talk had taken the bit in its teeth, and as she gently fingered the rose he had pointed to, her lips drew themselves into a quivering curve of extraordinary tenderness.

“Ah, yes, yes,” she said. “I could kneel down and thank God for it.”

He looked at her gravely, remembering the conclusion of their walk the afternoon before.

“You are very much to be envied,” he said. “With my whole heart I congratulate you.”

She raised her head, dismissing the gravity of the last minute.{96}

“Ah, but the Sunday-school,” she said.

“But I envy that, too,” said he. “It, as well as you, has its beaux jours. You would not grudge it them?”

She laughed.

“Ah, you have committed an inanity,” she said. “I was so afraid you were a person who never said anything stupid. But to pay compliments is stupid. And now I have been rude. That is even more stupid.”

“I think it is,” said he, “because it is also unnecessary.”

There was a further challenge in this, but she did not take the glove he had flung, and having reached the tree at the end of the lawn underneath which, three days ago, the ill-fated “Mill on the Floss” had lain, they turned back again towards the house, and she directed their talk, like their steps, in another direction.

“It is good of you,—I mean about Martin,” she said. “That is just what he wants, to go among people who will take him and his music seriously, not gasp just because he plays extremely fast. No one here really knows the difference between Rule Britannia and the Dead March. And yesterday—oh dear! oh dear!” And she broke out laughing.

“There isn’t much,” observed Frank, parenthetically. “But please tell me about yesterday.”

“I think I must, because, though you will laugh, you will laugh kindly. It was at the early service, and the dear boy played the overture to ‘Lohengrin’ as a voluntary, and my father thought it wasn’t quite suitable.”{97}

He considered this a moment.

“Do you know, I don’t think I want to laugh at all?” he said. “I understand perfectly.”

“But Martin didn’t. That was so funny.”

“No, he wouldn’t. That is one of the penalties of genius. In fact, it is what genius means. It is having one point of view so vivid that all others are dark, invisible beside it. And genius is always intolerant.”

Her eye brightened.

“I don’t know if you know or not,” she said, “but I expect you do. Is Martin really all that,—dear, stupid, old Martin?”

“I believe so. We are going to get him to London to find out. You will give him my message, won’t you? I go up to town to-day, and he may come any day he likes; the sooner the better. Lady Sunningdale is writing to you.”

“Oh, it would be heavenly!” said she.

He took his leave soon after, and went back to Chartries for an early lunch, since Lady Sunningdale, who never started anywhere in the morning, unless it was impossible to get there otherwise, had retained his services in order to minimize the dangers and difficulties incident to travel by rail with Suez Canal and Sahara. For Sahara had an unreasoning dislike of locomotive engines, which had never, at present, hurt her, and always tried to bite them, while Suez Canal, whenever it was feasible, jumped down between the platform and the train and smelled about for whatever there might be of interest among the wheels of the carriages. In addition to these excitements, their mistress never moved without a tea-basket, a collapsible card-table,—which usually collapsed,—a small library{98} of light literature, a jewel-case, so that the tedium of a journey in her company was reduced to a minimum, since when the train was in motion these recreations could be indulged in, and when it stopped there was more than enough to be done in collecting these priceless impedimenta to prevent any companion of hers from feeling a moment’s boredom that arose from idleness.

She also could hardly ever produce either her own or the dogs’ railway tickets when called upon to do so, thus giving use to games of hide-and-seek all over the carriage.

And to-day, in addition, Frank had something very considerable of his own to think about, something that made him very alert, yet very inattentive, that brightened his eye, yet prevented him seeing anything. And he could almost swear that the odour of sweet-peas pervaded the railway carriage.

Martin, mean time, was spending the morning on the banks of the stream which had given him those good moments early the day before. But to-day the sun was very hot and bright, and after an hour’s fruitless, but patient, attempts on the subaqueous lives, he abandoned the vain activity of the arm, and with the vague intention of returning home and getting through some ?schylus before fishing again towards evening, sat down to smoke a cigarette in the fictitious coolness, bred by the sound of running water, preparatory to trudging back across the baked fields. Tall grasses mixed with meadow-sweet and ragged-robin moved gently in the little breeze that stirred languidly in the air, but the sky was utterly bare of clouds and stretched a translucent dome of sapphire from the low-lying{99} horizon of the water-meadows on the one hand up to the high yellowing line of the downs on the other. At his feet flowed the beautiful stream, twining ropes of shifting crystal as it hurried on its stainless journey over beds of topaz-coloured gravel or chalk that gleamed with the lustre of pears beneath the surface. Strands and patches of weed waved in the suck of the water, struck by the sun into tawny brightness, shot here and there with incredible emerald, and tall brown-flowering rushes twitched and nodded in the stress of the current. Suspended larks carolled invisible against the brightness of the sky, swallows skimmed and swooped, and soon a moorhen, rendered bold by Martin’s immobility, half splashed, half swam across the stream just in front of him. And he thought no more of the fish he had not caught, but sat with hands clasped round his knees, and, without knowing it, drank deep of the ineffable beauty that was poured out around him on meadow and stream and sky. Every detail, too, was as exquisite as the whole: the yellow flags that stood ankle-deep in the edge of the river were each a miracle of design; the blue butterflies that hovered and poised on the meadow-sweet were more gorgeous with the azure of their wings and white and black border than a casket of lapis-lazuli set with silver and shod with ebony.

By degrees as he sat there, his cigarette smoked out, but with no thought of moving or of ?schylus, the vague and fluid currents of his mind that for years had coursed through his consciousness, though he himself had scarcely been conscious of them, began for the first time to crystallize into something illuminating and definite. Like some supersaturated solution of chemical{100} experiment, his mind, long crying out for and demanding beauty, needed but one more grain of desire to render its creed solid, and to himself now for the first time came the revelation of himself, and like a spectator at some enthralling drama, he watched himself, learning what he was, without comment either of applause or disgust, but merely fascinated by the fact of this new possession, his own individuality, and, even as Frank had said to Helen only yesterday, his own inalienable right to it. It was none other’s but his alone. There was nothing in the world the same as it, since every human being is a unique specimen, and, bad or good, it was his own clay, his own material, out of which his will, like some sculptor’s tool should fashion a figure of some kind. And everything he saw, the yellow iris, the blue butterfly, the water-weeds, were in their kind perfect. Their natural growth, unstunted by restraint or attempt to control them into something else, had brought them to that perfection; and was it conceivable in any thinkable scheme of things that man, the highest and infinitely most marvellous work of nature, should not be capable of rising, individual by individual, to some corresponding perfection? Soil, sun, environment were necessary; the flags would not grow in the desert, the lark would not soar nor carol in captivity, but given the freedom, the care, or the cultivation which each required, every living and growing thing had within itself the perfection possible to itself.

Up to this point his thought had been as intangible as a rainbow, though like a rainbow of definite shape and luminous colour, and showed itself only in a brightened, unseeing eye, and in fingers that twitched and{101} clutched till the nails were white with pressure round his flannelled knee. Then suddenly the crystallization came, ungrammatical, but convincing.

“It is me,” he said aloud, as Magda had said it.

In a moment the whole solution was solid.

Beauty. That was the food for which every fibre of his nature hungered and with which it would never be satiated. Long ago he had known it, but known it second-hand, known it as in a dream, when he quoted Browning, three days ago, to his sister. But that dream, that second-hand information, had become real and authentic. No matter how trivial might be the experience, that was what he demanded of all experience,—whether he ate or drank, it was beauty he craved; whether he ran or sat down, he knew now that, in so far as it was consciously done, it was the thrill of speed, the content of rest that he demanded of the function. Then, suddenly, he asked himself what he demanded in the exercise of the highest function of all, that of worship—Was it the pitch-pine pew, the magenta saint, the tuneless chant? Was it the fear of hell, the joy of an uncomprehended heaven, even though the gate-stones of the New Jerusalem were of jaspar and agate? Not so; for what did he worship? Absolute beauty, that quality of which everything that is beautiful has some grain of mirrored reflection. That was God, the supreme, the omnipotent, present in all that was beautiful just as much as he was present in the breaking of the Bread and the outpouring of the mystic Wine, for all was part of Him.