yers indomitable dreams.

The gravity of Michael's demeanour suited the grey town in which he
sojourned, and though Mr. Viner used to teaze him about his saintly
exterior, the priest seemed to enjoy his company.

"But don't look so solemn when you meet your sister, or she'll think
you're sighing for a niche in Chartres Cathedral, which for a young lady
emancipated from Germany would be a most distressing thought."

"I'm enjoying myself," said Michael earnestly.

"My dear old chap, I'm not questioning that for a moment, and personally
I find your attitude consorts very admirably with the mood in which
these northern towns of France always throw me," said Mr. Viner.

The fortnight came to an end, and to commemorate this chastening
interlude of a confidence and a calm whose impermanence Michael half
dreaded, half desired, he bought a pair of old candlesticks for the
Notting Dale Mission. Michael derived a tremendous consolation from this
purchase, for he felt that, even if in the future he should be powerless
to revive this healing time, its austere hours would be immortalized,
mirrored somehow in the candlesticks' bases as durably as if engraved
upon a Grecian urn. There was in this impulse nothing more sentimental
than in his erection last year of the small cairn to celebrate a
fleeting moment of faith on the Berkshire downs.

Stella was already settled in the bosom of the French family when
Michael reached Compiegne, and as he drove towards the Pension he began
for the first time to wonder what his sister would be like after these
two years. He was inclined to suppose that she would be a problem, and
he already felt qualms about the behaviour of her projected suddenly
like this from Germany into an atmosphere of romance. For Michael,
France always stood out as typically romantic to his fancy. Spain and
Italy were not within his realization as yet, and Germany he conceived
of as a series of towns filled with the noise of piano-scales and hoarse
gutturals. He hoped that Stella was not even now plunged into a girlish
love-affair with one of the idle young Frenchmen who haunted so
amorously the sunshine of this gay land. He even began to rehearse, as
his carriage jolted along the cobbled embankment of the Oise, a
particularly scathing scene in which he coldly denounced the importunate
lover, while Stella stood abashed by fraternal indignation. Then he
reflected that after all Stella was only fifteen and, as he remember