realities. Only Martin was flesh and blood,
to be loved and longed for and feared for just as he had always been.
All the physical properties of life--clothes, food, household
possessions, money--became of less and less importance to him. Had Amy
not watched over him he would have been many days without any food at
all, and one day he come into the living-room at breakfast-time clothed
in a towel. All this had come upon him with vastly increased power
during the last months. In Chapel, and whenever he had work to do in
connection with the Chapel, he was clear-headed and practical, but in
things to do with this world he was now worse than a child.

He was conscious of this increasing difficulty to deal with both
worlds. It was because one world--the world of God--was opening out
before him so widely and with so varied and thrilling a beauty that
there was less and less time to be spared for the drab realities of
physical things.

All his life he had been preparing, and then suddenly the call had
come. Shortly after Martin's return he had known in Chapel, one
evening, that God was approaching. It had happened that that day, owing
to his absorption in his work, he had eaten nothing, and there had come
to him, whilst praying to the congregation, a sensation of faintness so
strong that for a moment he thought he would fall from his seat. Then
it had passed, to give way to a strange, thrilling sense of expectancy.
It was as though a servant had opened the door and had announced: "My
master is coming, sir--" He had felt, indeed, as though he had been
lifted up, in the sheet of Paul the Apostle, to meet his God. There had
been the most wonderful sense of elevation, a clearing of light, a
gentler freshness in the air, a sudden sinking to remoteness of human
voices and mundane sounds. From that moment in the Chapel life had been
changed for him. He never seemed to come down again from that
mysterious elevation. Human voices sounded far away from him; he could
be urged, only with the greatest difficulty, to take his food, and he
frequently did not recognise members of his own congregation when they
came to see him. He waited now, waited, waited, for this visitation
that was approaching him. He could have no doubts of it.

Then one night he woke from a deep sleep. He was conscious that his
room was filled with a smoky light; in his heart was such an ecstasy
that he would have thought that the joy would kill him.

Something spok