he had crossed on the night of his confession
to Catherine; he lingered beside the same solitary fir on the brink of
the ridge. A winter world lay before him; soft brown woodland, or
reddish heath and fern, struck sideways by the sun, clothing the earth's
bareness everywhere--curling mists--blue points of distant hill--a gray
luminous depth of sky.

The eyes were moist, the lips moved. There in the place of his old
anguish he stood and blessed God!--not for any personal happiness, but
simply for that communication of Himself which may make every hour of
common living a revelation.

Twenty minutes later, leaving the park gate to his left, he hurried up
the lane leading to the vicarage. One look! he might not be able to
leave the squire later. The gate of the wood-path was ajar. Surely just
inside it he should find Catherine in her garden hat, the white-frocked
child dragging behind her! And there was the square stone house, the
brown cornfield, the red-brown woods! Why, what had the man been doing
with the study? White blinds showed it was a bedroom now. Vandal!
Besides, how could the boys have free access except to that ground-floor
room? And all that pretty stretch of grass under the acacia had been cut
up into stiff little lozenge-shaped beds, filled, he supposed, in summer
with the properest geraniums. He should never dare to tell that to
Catherine.

He stood and watched the little significant signs of change in this
realm, which had been once his own, with a dissatisfied mouth, his
undermind filled the while with tempestuous yearning and affection. In
that upper room he had lain through that agonised night of crisis; the
dawn-twitterings of the summer birds seemed to be still in his ears. And
there, in the distance, was the blue wreath of smoke hanging over Mile
End. Ah! the new cottages must be warm this winter. The children did not
lie in the wet any longer--thank God! Was there time just to run down to
Irwin's cottage, to have a look at the Institute?

He had been standing on the farther side of the road from the rectory
that he might not seem to be spying out the land and his successor's
ways too closely. Suddenly he found himself clinging to a gate near him
that led into a field. He was shaken by a horrible struggle for breath.
The self seemed to be foundering in a stifling sea, and fought like a
drowning thing. When the moment passed, he looked round him bewildered,
drawing his hand across his eyes. The w