the neighbourhood. Yet, Mark could never achieve
that indifference to her attitude either toward himself or toward other
people that he wished to achieve. It was odd that this evening he should
have beheld her in that relation to the wind, because in his thoughts
about her she always appeared to him like the wind, restlessly sighing
and fluttering round a comfortable house. However steady the
candle-light, however bright the fire, however absorbing the book,
however secure one may feel by the fireside, the wind is always there;
and throughout these tranquil months Esther had always been most
unmistakably there.

In the morning Mark went to Mass and made his Communion. It was a
strangely calm morning; through the unstained windows of the clerestory
the sun sloped quivering ladders of golden light. He looked round with
half a hope that Esther was in the church; but she was absent, and
throughout the service that brief vision of her dark transit across the
cold green sky of yester eve kept recurring to his imagination, so that
for all the rich peace of this interior he was troubled in spirit, and
the intention to make this Mass upon his seventeenth birthday another
spiritual experience was frustrated. In fact, he was worshipping
mechanically, and it was only when Mass was over and he was kneeling to
make an act of gratitude for his Communion that he began to apprehend
how he was asking fresh favours from God without having moved a step
forward to deserve them.

"I think I'm too pleased with myself," he decided, "I think I'm
suffering from spiritual pride. I think. . . ."

He paused, wondering if it was blasphemous to have an intuition that God
was about to play some horrible trick on him. Mark discussed with the
Rector the theological aspects of this intuition.

"The only thing I feel," said Mr. Ogilvie, "is that perhaps you are
leading too sheltered a life here and that the explanation of your
intuition is your soul's perception of this. Indeed, once or twice
lately I have been on the point of warning you that you must not get
into the habit of supposing you will always find the onset of the world
so gentle as here."

"But naturally I don't expect to," said Mark. "I was quite long enough
at Haverton House to appreciate what it means to be here."

"Yes," the Rector went on, "but even at Haverton House it was a passive
ugliness, just as here it is a passive beauty. After our Lord had fasted
forty days in the desert,