d, as domestic chaplain
and librarian.

"In the fulness of your generosity towards me you are creating a costly
sinecure," Julius had remonstrated.

"Not in the least. I am selfishly trying to secure myself a most
welcome companion, by asking you to undertake a very modest cure of
souls and to catalogue my books, when you might be filling some
important post and qualifying for a bishopric."

Julius had shaken his head sadly enough. "The high places of the Church
are not for me," he said. "Neither are her great adventures."

Thus did Julius March, somewhat broken both in health and spirit,
become a carpet-priest. The trumpet blasts of controversy reached him
as echoes merely, while his days passed in peaceful, if pensive
monotony. He read prayers morning and evening to the assembled
household in the chapel; reduced the confusion of the library shelves,
doing a fair amount of study, both secular and theological, during the
process; rode with his cousin on fine afternoons to distant farms, by
high-banked lanes in the lowland, or across the open moors; visited the
lodges, or the keepers' and gardeners' cottages within the limits of
the park, on foot. Now and again he took a service, or preached a
sermon, for good Mr. Caryll of Sandyfield, in whose amiable mind
instinctive admiration of those, even distantly, related to persons of
wealth and position jostled an equally instinctive terror of Mr.
March's "well-known Romanising tendencies." And in that there was,
surely, a touch of the irony of fate! Lastly, Julius did his utmost to
exercise an influence for good over the twenty and odd boys at the
racing stables--an unpromising generation at best, the majority of
whom, he feared, accepted his efforts for their moral and spiritual
welfare with the same somewhat brutish philosophy with which they
accepted Tom Chifney, the trainer's, rough-and-ready system of
discipline, and the thousand and one vagaries of the fine-limbed,
queer-tempered horses which were at once the glory and torment of their
young lives.

Things had gone on thus for rather more than a year, when Richard
Calmady married. Julius was perhaps inclined, beforehand, to underrate
the importance of that event. He was singularly innocent, so far, of
the whole question of woman. He had no sisters. At Oxford he had lived
exclusively among men, while the Tractarian Movement had offered a
sufficient outlet to all his emotion. The severe and exquisite verses
of the "