ce more, and, throwing his arms on the rough board before him, he
hid his face in his hands.

A long time passed; the silence grew ever more intense. At last
Stephen lifted his head. He felt as tired as if he had gone a long
journey since he entered the wooden building. Yet it was all exactly
the same as when he had come in an hour before,--the rows of empty
forms and the bare tables, with grass and flowers growing up between
them. Stephen's eyes wandered out through the open door. He noticed a
thick mug of earthenware lying beside the path outside, evidently left
behind by the woodcutters as not worth taking with them. A common
earthenware mug it was, of coarse material and ugly shape; and
cracked. As Stephen's eyes fell upon it, he felt as if he hated that
mug more than he had ever before hated anything in his life. It seemed
to have been left behind there, on purpose to mock him. Here he was
with only an earthenware mug in sight, he who might have been
surrounded by the exquisite and delicate porcelain that he remembered
in his father's factory at Limoges. All that beauty and luxury
belonged to him by right; they might still have been his, if only he
had not listened for years to the Voice. And now the Voice had led him
on this fool's errand. Here he was, preaching to nobody, and looking
at a cracked mug. Was his whole life a mistake? a delusion? 'Am I a
fool after all?' he asked himself bitterly.

He was in the sad, bitter mood that is called 'Reaction.' Strangely
enough, it often seizes people just when they have done some
particularly difficult piece of work for their Master. Perhaps it
comes to keep them from thinking that they can finish anything in
their own strength alone.

Stephen was in the grip of this mood now. Happily he had wrestled with
the same sort of temptation many times before. He knew it of old; he
knew, too, that the best way to meet it is to face this giant Reaction
boldly, as Christian faced Apollyon, to wrestle with it and so to
overcome. He went straight out of the door to where the mug was lying,
and took up that mug, that cracked mug, in his hands, more reverently
than if it had been a vase of the most precious and fragile porcelain.
He took it up, and accepted it, this thing he hated worst of all. If
life had led him only to a cracked mug, at least he would accept that
mug and use it as best he could. Carrying it in his hands, he walked
to the little stream whose gentle murmur came thro