for a snuff-box, and brought it out.
"Go along, if you can't stand it. And don't come back till you've seen
through the devil's trick. I don't mind what I bet that you won't run
away."

Left alone, Canon Nicholls covered his blind eyes with his hands and
heaved a deep sigh.

The man who had just left him was the object of his keenest affection,
the apple of those blind eyes that craved to look upon his face. But his
love was not blind, and he felt the danger there lay in the seeming
perfectness of the young man. Mark's nature was gloriously sweet and
abounding in the higher gifts; his love of God had the awe of a little
child, and his love of men had the tenderness of a shepherd towards his
lost sheep. Mark had loved life and learning, had revelled in Oxford,
and would, in one sense, be an undergraduate all his days. He had known
dreams of ambition, and visions of success in working for his country.
Then gently--not with any shock--had come the vocation to the
priesthood, and so tenderly had the tendrils that attached him to a
man's life in the world been loosened, that the process hardly seemed to
have hurt any of the sensitive sympathies and interests he had always
enjoyed. Even in the matter of giving up great possessions, all had come
so gradually as to seem most natural and least strained.

Long before the Groombridges could be brought to believe that the
brilliant and favourite young cousin had rejected all that they could
leave him, it had become a matter of course to the rest of the family
and their friends that Mark Molyneux would be a priest, and give up the
property to the younger brother.

When the outer world took up the matter, Father Molyneux always made
people feel as if allusions to his renunciation of Groombridge were
simply quite out of taste, and nothing out of taste seemed in keeping
with anything connected with him. It was all so simple to Mark, and so
perfect to Canon Nicholls, that the latter almost dreaded this very
perfection as unlikely, and unbefitting the "second-rate" planet in
which it was his lot to live. And to confirm this almost superstitious
feeling of a man who had lived to know where the jolts and jars of life
cause the acutest suffering to the idealist, had come this fresh
aspiration of Mark's after a life more completely perfect in itself.
Strong instincts were entirely in accord with the older man's sober
judgment of the situation. And yet he wished it could be otherwise. He