are all checked, perverted, driven and counter-driven by a mysterious
force. Let no man who has not known such hours and the terror of such a
dominion utter judgment upon his neighbour.

To Martin the threat of this conflict with his father over Maggie was
the one crisis that he had wished to avoid. But his character, which
was naturally easy and friendly and unsuspicious, had confused him.
Those three weeks with Maggie had been so happy, so free from all
morbidity and complication, that he had forgotten the world outside.
For a moment when Maggie had told him that she had given her note to
Caroline he had been afraid, but he had been lulled as the days passed
and nothing interfered with their security. Now he was suddenly plunged
into the middle of a confusion that was all the more complicated
because he could not tell what his mother and his, sister were
thinking. He knew that Amy had disliked him ever since his return, and
that that dislike had been changed into something fiercer since his
declared opposition to Thurston. His mother he simply did not
understand at all. She spoke to him still with the same affection and
tenderness, but behind the words he felt a hard purpose and a
mysterious aloofness.

She was not like his mother at all; it was as though some spy had been
introduced into the house in his mother's clothing.

But for them he did not care; it was his father of whom he must think.
Here, too, there was a mystery from which he was deliberately kept. He
knew, of course, that they were all expecting some crisis; as the days
advanced he could feel that the excitement increased. He knew that his
father had declared that he had visions and that there was to be a
revelation very shortly; but of these visions and this revelation he
heard only indirectly from others. His father said nothing to him of
these things, and at the ordinary Chapel services on Sunday there was
no allusion to them. He knew that the Inside Saints had a society and
rules of their own inside the larger body, and from that inner society
he was quite definitely excluded. Of that exclusion he would have been
only too glad had it not been for his father, but now when he saw him
growing from day to day more haggard and worn, more aloof from all
human society, when lie saw him wrapped further and further into some
strange and as it seemed to him insane absorption, he was determined to
fight his way into the heart of it. His growing intimacy with