y living he had so long dreaded and
put from him, lest it should tax his young energies too lightly, he was
happy--deeply, abundantly happy, at peace with God, at one with man.

_Happy!_ Langham, sitting at the outer corner of one of the benches, by
the open door, gradually ceased to listen, started on other lines of
thought by this realisation, warm, stimulating, provocative, of another
man's happiness.

Outside, the shadows lengthened across the green; groups of distant
children or animals passed in and out of the golden light-spaces; the
patches of heather left here and there glowed as the sunset touched
them. Every now and then his eye travelled vaguely past a cottage
garden, gay with the pinks and carmines of the phloxes, into the cool
browns and bluish-grays of the raftered room beyond; babies toddled
across the road, with stooping mothers in their train; the whole air and
scene seemed to be suffused with suggestions of the pathetic
expansiveness and helplessness of human existence, which, generation
after generation, is still so vulnerable, so confiding, so eager. Life
after life flowers out from the darkness and sinks back into it again.
And in the interval what agony, what disillusion! All the apparatus of a
universe that men may know what it is to hope and fail, to win and lose!
_Happy!_--in this world, 'where men sit and hear each other groan.' His
friend's confidence only made Langham as melancholy as Job.

What was it based on? In the first place, on Christianity--'on the
passionate acceptance of an exquisite fairy tale,' said the dreaming
spectator to himself, 'which at the first honest challenge of the
critical sense withers in our grasp! That challenge Elsmere has never
given it, and in all probability never will. No! A man sees none the
straighter for having a wife he adores, and a profession that suits him,
between him and unpleasant facts!'

* * * * *

In the evening Langham, with the usual reaction of his afternoon self
against his morning self, felt that wild horses should not take him to
Church again, and, with a longing for something purely mundane, he
stayed at home with a volume of Montaigne, while apparently all the rest
of the household went to evening service.

After a warm day the evening had turned cold and stormy; the west was
streaked with jagged strips of angry cloud, the wind was rising in the
trees, and the temperature had suddenly fallen so much th