found.

To Martin she was the one out-standing proof of the reality of the
Chapel. All the others--his sister, Miss Avies, Thurston, Crashaw, the
Miss Cardinals, yes, and his father too, were, in one way or another,
eccentric, abnormal, but Miss Pyncheon was the sane every-day world,
the worldly world, the world of drinks and dinners, and banks and
tobacconists, and yet she believed as profoundly as any of them. What
did she believe? She was an Inside Saint, therefore she must have
accepted this whole story of the Second Coming and the rest of it. Of
course women would believe anything ... Nevertheless ...

He scarcely listened to their chatter. He was forcing himself not to
look at his sister, and yet Thurston's news seemed so extraordinary to
him that his eye kept stealing round to her to see whether she were
still the same. Could she have accepted him, that bounder and cad and
charlatan? He felt a sudden cold chill of isolation as though in this
world none of the ordinary laws were followed. "By God, I am a stranger
here," he thought. It was not until after dinner that night that he was
alone with his father. He had resolved on many fine things in the
interval. He was going to "have it out with him," "to put his foot
down," "to tell him that such a thing as Thurston's marriage to his
sister was perfectly impossible." And then, for the thousandth time
since his return to England he felt strangely weak and irresolute. He
did wish to be "firm" with his father, but it would have been so much
easier to be firm had he not been so fond of him. "Soft, sentimental
weakness," he called it to himself, but he knew that it was something
deeper than that, something that he would never be able to deny.

He went into his father's study that night with a strange dismal
foreboding as though he were being drawn along upon some path that he
did not want to follow. What was his father mixed up with all this
business for? Why were such men as Thurston in existence? Why couldn't
life be simple and straightforward with people like his father and
himself and that girl Maggie alone somewhere with nothing to interfere?
Life was never just as you wanted it, always a little askew, a little
twisted, cynically cocking its eye at you before it vanished round the
corner? He didn't seem to be able to manage it. Anyway, he wasn't going
to have that fellow Thurston marrying his sister.

He found his father lying back in his arm-chair fast asleep, l