er, too," he said, pausing--"that you forgive her?"

Ashe hesitated.

"I do not believe," he said, at last, "that she would attach any more
meaning to that word than I do. She would think it unreal. What's done
is done."

The Dean's heart leaped up in the typical Christian challenge to the
fatal and the irrevocable. While life lasts the lost sheep can always be
sought and found; and love, the mystical wine, can always be poured into
the wounds of the soul, healing and recreating! But he said no more. He
felt himself humiliated and defeated.

Ashe and Lady Tranmore took leave of him with an extreme gentleness and
affection. He would almost rather they had treated him ill. Yes, he was
an optimist and a dreamer!--one who had, indeed, never grappled in his
own person with the worst poisons and corrosions of the soul. Yet still,
as he passed along the London streets--marked here and there by the
newspaper placards which announced Ashe's committee triumphs of the
night before--he was haunted anew by the immortal words:

"One thing thou lackest," ... and "Come, follow me!"

* * * * *

Ah!--could he have done such a thing himself? or was he merely the
scribe carelessly binding on other men's shoulders things grievous to be
borne? The answering passion of his faith mounted within him--joined
with a scorn for the easy conditions and happy, scholarly pursuits of
his own life, and a thirst which in the early days of Christendom would
have been a thirst for witness and for martyrdom.

* * * * *

Three days later the Dean--a somewhat shrunken and diminished figure, in
ordinary clerical dress, without the buckles and silk stockings that
typically belonged to him--stood once more at the entrance of a small
villa outside the Venetian town of Treviso.

He was very weary, and as he sought disconsolately through all his
pockets for the wherewithal to pay his fly, while the spring rain
pattered on his wide-awake, he produced an impression as of some
delicate, draggled thing, which would certainly have gone to the heart
of his adoring wife could she have beheld it. The Dean's ways were not
sybaritic. He pecked at food and drink like a bird; his clothes never
caused him a moment's thought; and it seemed to him a waste of the night
to use it for sleeping. But none the less did he go through life finely
looked after. Mrs. Winston dressed him, took his tickets and paid his