and there was no more need of shift or subterfuge:
now it was one rush and hurry to the end. He had capitulated; a
thin-skinned aversion to confronting difficulties, when he saw the
chance of avoiding them, had won the day. He intended--had perhaps the
whole time intended--to take the hand held out to him. After all, why
not? Anyone else, as Polly said, would have jumped at John's offer. He
alone must argue himself blue in the face over it.

But as he sat and pondered the lengthy chain of circumstance--Polly's
share in it, John's, his own, even the part played by incorporeal
things--he brought up short against the word "decision". He might
flatter himself by imagining he had been free to decide; in reality
nothing was further from the truth. He had been subtly and slily guided
to his goal--led blindfold along a road that not of his choosing.
Everything and every one had combined to constrain him: his favours to
John, the failure of his business, Polly's inclinations and
persuasions, his own fastidious shrinkings. So that, in the end, all he
had had to do was to brush aside a flimsy gossamer veil, which hung
between him and his fate. Was it straining a point to see in the whole
affair the workings of a Power outside himself--against himself, in so
far as it took no count of his poor earth-blind vision?

Well, if this were so, better still: his ways were in God's hand. And
after all, what did it matter where one strove to serve one's
Maker--east or west or south or north--and whether the stars overhead
were grouped in this constellation or in that? Their light was a pledge
that one would never be overlooked or forgotten, traced by the hand of
Him who had promised to note even a sparrow's fall. And here he spoke
aloud into the darkness the ancient and homely formula that is man's
stand-by in face of the untried, the unknown.

"If God wills.... God knows best."

Part III

Chapter I

The house stood not far from the Great Swamp. It was of weather-board,
with a galvanised iron roof, and might have been built from a child's
drawing of a house: a door in the centre, a little window on either
side, a chimney at each end. Since the ground sloped downwards, the
front part rested on piles some three feet high, and from the rutty
clay-track that would one day be a street wooden steps led up to the
door. Much as Mahony would have liked to face it with a verandah, he
did not feel justified in spending more than he cou