his archidiaconal experience. All the same she began to feel
worried--she was beginning to doubt if she had the same qualifications
for choosing a clergyman as she had for choosing a looker or a
dairy-girl. She knew the sort of man she liked as a man, and more
vaguely the sort of man she liked as a parson, she also was
patriotically anxious to find somebody adequate to the honours and
obligations of the living. Nobody she saw or heard of seemed to come up
to her double standard of man and minister, and she was beginning to
wonder to what extent she could compromise her pride by writing--not to
the Archdeacon, but over his head to the Bishop--when she saw in the
local paper that Father Lawrence, of the Society of Sacred Pity, was
preaching a course of sermons in Marlingate.

Immediately memories came back to her, so far and pale that they were
more like the memories of dreams than of anything which had actually
happened. She saw a small dark figure standing with its back to the
awakening light and bidding godspeed to all that was vital and beautiful
and more-than-herself in her life.... "Go, Christian soul"--while she in
the depths of her broken heart had cried "Stay, stay!" But he had obeyed
the priest rather than the lover, he had gone and not stayed ... and
afterwards the priest had tried to hold him for her in futurity--"think
of Martin, pray for Martin," but the lover had let him slip, because she
could not think and dared not pray, and he had fallen back from her into
his silent home in the past.

The old wound could still hurt, for a moment it seemed as if her whole
body was pain because of it. Successful, important, thriving Joanna
Godden could still suffer because eight years ago she had not been
allowed to make the sacrifice of all that she now held so triumphantly.
This mere name of Martin's brother had pricked her heart, and she
suddenly wanted to get closer to the past than she could get with her
memorial-card and photograph and tombstone. Even Sir Harry Trevor,
ironic link with faithful love, was gone now--there was only Lawrence.
She would like to see him--not to talk to him of Martin, she couldn't
bear that, and there would be something vaguely improper about it--but
he was a clergyman, for all he disguised the fact by calling himself a
priest, and she would offer him the living of Brodnyx with Pedlinge and
let the neighbourhood sit up as much as it liked.

Sec.4

Father Lawrence came to see her