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