sin in the lives of others is the worst of sinners. There
are even times when chastity can be very chill and bare, though purity
is always lovely."

"But you were saying----" began Ishmael, then stopped. "I think I do
know what you mean," he said more humbly. The Parson made no reply, but,
stopping in his walk, looked over a low wall of loose granite and laid
his arms along it. "Come and look here a minute," he said.

The sun had died away, but the mist had not returned, and a still
greyness held the world in the low-lying part of the moor which they had
reached.

Fields lay on one side and stretched in a parti-coloured patterning over
the slope before them as they leant upon the wall. The breeze, too,
seemed not to stir there, as though the pearly greyness that seemed to
tinge the very air were a blight that lay on sound and motion as well as
sight. No breath stirred strong enough to lift the petals of the
gorse-blossoms by the wall, or rustle the wayside plants. The only
movement came from a field of long grass on the slope--one of the
pattern of fields, newly-ploughed, short-turfed, or misted with green
from the three-weeks-old corn springing a few inches high, a pattern
that lay like a coverlet drawn over the rounded flank of the hill. And
over that one field movement was busy--the rank grass was exactly the
length, density, texture, to respond to what imperceptible breath there
was, and that grass only. Over and over it passed the silvery waves made
by the bending of the blades, over and over, always rippling up the
slope till it looked as though a film of smoke were perpetually being
blown from below to vanish over the crest. Ripple after ripple, ripple
after ripple, shivered up the slope and was gone--the field shuddered
and breathed with it; there was something uncanny about this silent
unceasing movement in the dead landscape--this visible effect of an
invisible thing.

"We're most of us too full of effort," said the Parson abruptly; "we
think too much of trying to be good, of whether what we are going to do
is right or wrong. Whereas if we only got our minds into the right
attitude the rest would follow naturally and be worth all the striving.
If we could only be more flower-like--let ourselves grow and blossom.
Look at that field, the only thing moving; d'you see it? Well, it's
rippling like that all by itself because it's the only thing able to
answer to the little breath that's abroad. If you get yourse