came up from the
deeps and frightened the smaller fish away. He searched for a
bullfinch's nest; but he did not find one, though he saw several of the
birds singing in the snowberry bushes; round and ruddy as October apples
they looked. At last he went to the ruined chapel, where after
speculating idly for a little while upon its former state he fell as he
usually did when he visited Wych Maries into a contemplation of the two
images of the Blessed Virgin and St. Mary Magdalene. While he sat on a
hummock of grass before the old West doorway he received an impression
that since he last visited these forms of stone they had ceased to be
mere relics of ancient worship unaccountably preserved from ruin, but
that they had somehow regained their importance. It was not that he
discerned in them any miraculous quality of living, still less of
winking or sweating as images are reputed to wink and sweat for the
faithful. No, it was not that, he decided, although by regarding them
thus entranced as he was he could easily have brought himself to the
point of believing in a supernatural manifestation. He was too well
aware of this tendency to surrender to it; so, rousing himself from the
rapt contemplation of them and forsaking the hummock of grass, he
climbed up into the branches of a yew-tree that stood beside the chapel,
that there and from that elevation, viewing the images and yet unviewed
by them directly, he could be immune from the magic of fancy and
discover why they should give him this impression of having regained
their utility, yes, that was the word, utility, not importance. They
were revitalized not from within, but from without; and even as his mind
leapt at this explanation he perceived in the sunlight, beyond the
shadowy yew-tree in which he was perched, Esther sitting upon that
hummock of grass where but a moment ago he had himself been sitting.

For a moment, as if to contradict a reasonable explanation of the
strange impression the images had made upon him, Mark supposed that she
was come there for a tryst. This vanished almost at once in the
conviction that Esther's soul waited there either in question or appeal.
He restrained an impulse to declare his presence, for although he felt
that he was intruding upon a privacy of the soul, he feared to destroy
the fruits of that privacy by breaking in. He knew that Esther's pride
would be so deeply outraged at having been discovered in a moment of
weakness thus upon he