who destroyed it. The roofless haunt of
bats and owls, preserved from complete collapse by the ancient ivy that
covered its walls, the mortar between its stones the prey of briers, its
floor a nettle bed, the chapel remained a mystery. Yet over the arch of
the west door the two Maries gazed heavenward as they had gazed for six
hundred years. The curiosity of the few antiquarians who visited the
place and speculated upon its past had kept the images clear of the ivy
that covered the rest of the fabric. Mark did not put this to the credit
of the antiquarians; but now perceiving for the first time these two
austere shapes of divine women under conditions of atmosphere that
enhanced their austerity and unearthliness he ascribed their freedom
from decay to the interposition of God. To Mark's imagination, fixed
upon the images while Esther wandered solitary in the field beyond the
chapel, there was granted another of those moments of vision which
marked like milestones his spiritual progress. He became suddenly
assured that he would neither marry nor beget children. He was
astonished to find himself in the grip of this thought, for his mind had
never until this evening occupied itself with marriage or children, nor
even with love. Yet here he was obsessed by the conviction of his finite
purpose in the scheme of the world. He could not, he said to himself, be
considered credulous if he sought for the explanation of his state of
mind in the images of the two Maries. He looked at them resolved to
illuminate with reason's eye the fluttering shadows of dusk that gave to
the stone an illusion of life's bloom.

"Did their lips really move?" he asked aloud, and from the field beyond
the black cow lowed a melancholy negative. Whether the stone had spoken
or not, Mark accepted the revelation of his future as a Divine favour,
and thenceforth he regarded the ruined chapel of Wych Maries as the
place where the vow he made on that Whit-sunday was accepted by God.

"Aren't you ever coming?" the voice of Esther called across the field,
and Mark hurried away to rejoin her on the grassgrown drive that led
round the cedar grove to Rushbrooke Grange.

"It's too late now to go inside," he objected.

They were standing before the house.

"It's not too late at all," she contradicted eagerly. "Down here it
seems later than it really is."

Rushbrooke Grange lacked the architectural perfection of the average
Cotswold manor. Being a one-storied