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t look the sort of girl who'd faint. But I suppose you've had a rotten time with your father and all." His eyes still searched for hers. She determined that she would not look at him; her heart was beating strangely and, although she did not look, she could in some sub-conscious way see the rough toss of his hair against his forehead; she could smell the stuff of his coat. But she would not look up. "You're going to live here, aren't you?" "Yes," she said. "I've only just come back," he went on. "I know," she said. "Oh! of course; that girl," jerking his head in the direction of the tea-table and laughing. "She told you. She's been here this afternoon, hasn't she? She chatters like anything. Don't you believe half she says." There was another pause. The voices at the tea-table seemed to come from very far away. Then he said roughly, moving a very little nearer to her: "I'm glad you've come." At that she raised her eyes, her cheeks flushed. She looked him full in the face, her head up. Her heart thundered in her breast. She felt as though she were at the beginning of some tremendous adventure--an adventure enthralling, magnificent--and perilous. PART II THE CHARIOT OF FIRE CHAPTER I THE WARLOCKS There is beyond question, in human nature, such a thing as an inherited consciousness of God, and this consciousness, if inherited through many generations, may defy apparent reason, all progress of vaunted civilisations, and even, it may be suggested, the actual challenge of death itself. This consciousness of God had been quite simply the foundation of Mr. Warlock's history. In the middle of the eighteenth century it expressed itself in the formula of John Wesley's revival; the John Wesley of that day preached up and down the length and breadth of Westmoreland, Cumberland, Northumberland, Durham, and being a fighter, a preacher and a simple-minded human being at one and the same time, received a large following and died full of years and honours. It was somewhere about 1830 that this John's grandson, James Warlock, Martin's grandfather, broke from the main body and led his little flock on to the wide spaces of Salisbury Plain. James Warlock, unlike his father and grandfather, was a little sickly man with a narrow chest, no limbs to speak of and a sharp pale face. Martin had a faded daguerreotype of him set against the background of the old Wiltshire kitchen, his black clothes
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