r heart dissolved within her into tender possessiveness. There came
flooding into her mind the old phrases of an ancient story: "Whither
thou goest I will go... thy people shall be my people and thy God my
God.... The Lord do so to me and more also if aught but death part thee
and me."

Just those words would Lady Ella have said to her husband now, but she
was capable of no such rhetoric.

"Whither thou goest," she whispered almost inaudibly, and she could get
no further. "My dear," she said.

(18)

At two o'clock the next morning Scrope was still up. He was sitting over
the snoring gas fire in his study. He did not want to go to bed. His
mind was too excited, he knew, for any hope of sleep. In the last twelve
hours, since he had gone out across the park to his momentous talk with
Lady Sunderbund, it seemed to him that his life had passed through its
cardinal crisis and come to its crown and decision. The spiritual voyage
that had begun five years ago amidst a stormy succession of theological
nightmares had reached harbour at last. He was established now in the
sure conviction of God's reality, and of his advent to unify the lives
of men and to save mankind. Some unobserved process in his mind had
perfected that conviction, behind the cloudy veil of his vacillations
and moods. Surely that work was finished now, and the day's experience
had drawn the veil and discovered God established for ever.

He contrasted this simple and overruling knowledge of God as the supreme
fact in a practical world with that vague and ineffective subject for
sentiment who had been the "God" of his Anglican days. Some theologian
once spoke of God as "the friend behind phenomena"; that Anglican deity
had been rather a vague flummery behind court and society, wealth,
"respectability," and the comfortable life. And even while he had lived
in lipservice to that complaisant compromise, this true God had been
here, this God he now certainly professed, waiting for his allegiance,
waiting to take up the kingship of this distraught and bloodstained
earth. The finding of God is but the stripping of bandages from the
eyes. Seek and ye shall find....

He whispered four words very softly: "The Kingdom of God!"

He was quite sure he had that now, quite sure.

The Kingdom of God!

That now was the form into which all his life must fall. He recalled his
vision of the silver sphere and of ten thousand diverse minds about the
world all making their