which she would very soon forget the visionary who was throwing away his
manhood and all the best years of his life just because he had learnt
that he was the son of a drunken and abandoned woman, and had himself
got drunk twice in his life.

The interview with Sir Godfrey and Lady Raleigh had been entirely
satisfactory. They both considered in their hearts that their daughter
had been very badly treated. From every social point of view this was a
match which left nothing to be desired, and so they said "yes," and
Garthorne went back to Enid, and said, triumphantly, as he kissed her
for the first time since that memorable kiss on the steamer:

"And so, you see, darling, I've won, after all!"

It was thus that it came about that, on the same day, as the Fates would
have it, two ceremonies were being performed at the same hour, one in
St. George's, Hanover Square, and one before the altar at Worcester
Cathedral.

The Bishop, in full canonicals, surrounded by his attendant clergy, sat
inside the altar rails in front of the Communion Table, and on the
topmost step before the rails knelt two young men wearing surplices and
the hoods of Bachelors of Arts of Oxford.

It was the Feast of St. James the Apostle, and in his exhortation the
Archdeacon, who was preacher for the day, had taken for his text the
collect:

"Grant, O merciful God, that, as Thine holy Apostle St. James,
leaving his father and all that he had without delay, was obedient
unto the call of Thy Son Jesus Christ and followed Him, so we,
forsaking all worldly and carnal affections, may be evermore ready
to follow Thy holy commandments, through Jesus Christ our Lord!"

One of the men kneeling at the altar rails was Mark Ernshaw, and the
other was Vane Maxwell.

Among the somewhat scanty congregation which had remained after the
usual morning service, sat Sir Arthur Maxwell. A year ago he would have
been inclined to laugh at the idea of his son sacrificing all his
brilliant worldly prospects to enter the Church. He was, as has already
been said, a deeply religious man himself, but still, he was a man of
the world, a man who had made his own way through the world, and won by
sheer hard work some of the prizes which it has to give, and, like many
others of his class, he had come to look upon the clerical profession
somewhat as the refuge of the intellectually destitute.

But as the time had gone on since that scene in his son's roo