accumulating reserves of spiritual energy,
just as we in our poor human fashion try to accumulate in Lent reserves
of spiritual energy that will enable us to celebrate Easter worthily, He
was assailed by the Tempter more fiercely than ever during His life on
earth. The history of all the early Egyptian monks, the history indeed
of any life lived without losing sight of the way of spiritual
perfection displays the same phenomena. In the action and reaction of
experience, in the rise and fall of the tides, in the very breathing of
the human lungs, you may perceive analogies of the divine rhythm. No, I
fancy your intuition of this morning is nothing more than one of those
movements which warn us that the sleeper will soon wake."

Mark went away from this conversation with the Rector dissatisfied. He
wanted something more than analogies taken from the experience of
spiritual giants, Titans of holiness whose mighty conquests of the flesh
seemed as remote from him as the achievements of Alexander might appear
to a captain of the local volunteers. What he had gone to ask the Rector
was whether it was blasphemous to suppose that God was going to play a
horrible trick on him. He had not wanted a theological discussion, an
academic question and reply. Anything could be answered like that,
probably himself in another twenty years, when he had preached some
hundreds of sermons, would talk like that. Moreover, when he was alone
Mark understood that he had not really wanted to talk about his own
troubles to the Rector at all, but that his real preoccupation had been
and still was Esther. He wondered, oh, how much he wondered, if her
brother had the least suspicion of her friendship with Will Starling, or
if Miriam had had the least inkling that Esther had not come in till
nine o'clock last night because she had been to Wych Maries? Mark,
remembering those wild eyes and that windblown hair when she stood for a
moment framed in the doorway of the Rector's library, could not believe
that none of her family had guessed that something more than the whim to
wander over the hills had taken her out on such a night. Did Mrs.
Ogilvie, promenading so placidly along her garden borders, ever pause in
perplexity at her daughter's behaviour? Calling them all to mind, their
attitudes, the expressions of their faces, the words upon their lips,
Mark was sure that none of them had any idea what Esther was doing. He
debated now the notion of warning Miri