uld accompany Mr. Viner on
his holiday in France, and afterwards stay with Stella with a family at
Compiegne for the rest of the time. Michael went to see his mother off
at Charing Cross before he joined Mr. Viner.

"Darling Michael," she murmured as the train began to move slowly
forward. "You're looking so well and happy--just like you were two years
ago. Just like----"

The rest of the comparison was lost in the noise of the speeding train.

Chapter X: _Stella_

Michael spent a charming fortnight with Father Viner in Amiens, Chartres
and Rouen. The early Masses to which they went along the cool, empty
streets of the morning, and the shadowy, candle-lit Benedictions from
which they came home through the deepening dusk gave to Michael at least
a profound hope, if not the astonishing faith of his first religious
experience. Sitting with the priest at the open window of their inn,
while down below the footsteps of the wayfarers were pattering like
leaves, Michael recaptured some of that emotion of universal love which
with sacramental force had filled his heart during the wonder of
transition from boyhood to adolescence. He did not wish to know more
about these people than could be told by the sound of their progress so
light, so casual, so essentially becoming to the sapphirine small world
in which they hurried to and fro. The passion of hope overwhelmed
Michael's imagination with a beauty that was perfectly expressed by the
unseen busy populations of a city's waning twilight. Love, birth, death,
greed, ambition, all humanity's stress of thought and effort, were
merged in a murmurous contentment of footfalls and faint-heard voices.
Michael supposed that somehow to God the universe must sound much as
this tall street of Rouen sounded now to him at his inn window, and he
realized for the first time how God must love the world. Later, the
twilight and voices and footfalls would fade together into night, and
through long star-scattered silences Michael would brood with a rapture
that became more than hope, if less than faith with restless, fiery
heart. Then clocks would strike sonorously; the golden window-panes
would waver and expire; Mr. Viner would tap his pipe upon the sill; and
Michael and he would follow their own great shadows up into bedrooms
noisy in the night-wind and prophetic of sleep's immense freedom, until
with the slanting beams of dawn Michael would wake and at Mass time seek
to enchain with pra