ttle pictures of Murewell.
The green, with the sun on the house-fronts, the awning over the village
shop, the vane on the old 'Manor-house,' the familiar figures at the
doors; his church, with every figure in the Sunday congregation as clear
to him as though he were that moment in the pulpit; the children he had
taught, the sick he had nursed, this or that weather-beaten or
brutalised peasant whose history he knew, whose tragic secrets he had
learnt,--all these memories and images clung about him as though with
ghostly hands, asking, 'Why will you desert us? You are ours--stay with
us!'

Then his thoughts would run over the future, dwelling, with a tense
realistic sharpness, on every detail which lay before him--the
arrangements with his _locum tenens_, the interview with the bishop, the
parting with the rectory. It even occurred to him to wonder what must be
done with Martha and his mother's cottage.

His mother? As he thought of her a wave of unutterable longing rose and
broke. The difficult tears stood in his eyes. He had a strange
conviction that at this crisis of his life she of _all_ human beings
would have understood him best.

When would the squire know? He pictured the interview with him,
divining, with the same abnormal clearness of inward vision, Mr.
Wendover's start of mingled triumph and impatience--triumph in the new
recruit, impatience with the Quixotic folly which could lead a man to
look upon orthodox dogma as a thing real enough to be publicly
renounced, or clerical pledges as more than a form of words. So
henceforth he was on the same side with the squire, held by an
indiscriminating world as bound to the same negations, the same
hostilities! The thought roused in him a sudden fierceness of moral
repugnance. The squire and Edward Langham--they were the only sceptics
of whom he had ever had close and personal experience. And with all his
old affection for Langham, all his frank sense of pliancy in the
squire's hands, yet in this strait of life how he shrinks from them
both!--souls at war with life and man, without holiness, without
perfume!

Is it the law of things? 'Once loosen a man's _religio_, once fling away
the old binding elements, the old traditional restraints which have made
him what he is, and moral deterioration is certain.' How often he has
heard it said! How often he has endorsed it! Is it true? His heart grows
cold within him. What good man can ever contemplate with patience the
lo