me when I fall into the habit of sneering at the
episcopate."

That night Father Rowley was attending a large temperance demonstration
in the Town Hall for the purpose of securing if possible a smaller
proportion of public houses than one for every eighty of the population,
which was the average for Chatsea. The meeting lasted until nearly ten
o'clock; and it had already struck the hour when Father Rowley with Mark
and two or three others got back to Keppel Street. There was nothing
Father Rowley disliked so much as arriving home himself after ten, and
he hurried up to his room without inquiring if everybody was in.

Mark's window looked out on Keppel Street; and the May night being warm
and his head aching from the effects of the meeting, he sat for nearly
an hour at the open window gazing down at the passers by. There was not
much to see, nothing more indeed than couples wandering home, a
bluejacket or two, an occasional cat, and a few women carrying jugs of
beer. By eleven o'clock even this slight traffic had ceased, and there
was nothing down the silent street except a salt wind from the harbour
that roused a memory of the beach at Nancepean years ago when he had sat
there watching the glow-worm and decided to be a lighthouse-keeper
keeping his lamps bright for mariners homeward bound. It was of streets
like Keppel Street that they would have dreamed, with the Stag Light
winking to port, and the west wind blowing strong astern. What a
lighthouse-keeper Father Rowley was! How except by the grace of God
could one explain such goodness as his? Fashions in saintliness might
change, but there was one kind of saint that always and for every creed
spoke plainly of God's existence, such saints as St. Francis of Assisi
or St. Anthony of Padua, who were manifestly the heirs of Christ. With
what a tender cynicism Our Lord had called St. Peter to be the
foundation stone of His Church, with what a sorrowful foreboding of the
failure of Christianity. Such a choice appeared as the expression of
God's will not to be let down again as He was let down by Adam. Jesus
Christ, conscious at the moment of what He must shortly suffer at the
hands of mankind, must have been equally conscious of the failure of
Christianity two thousand years beyond His Agony and Bloody Sweat and
Crucifixion. Why, within a short time after His life on earth it was
necessary for that light from heaven to shine round about Saul on the
Damascus road, because al