with anybody else except Rowley in charge the effect
would be damnable. As it is, he manages to keep us from feeling as if
we'd paid to go and look at the Zoo. You're a lucky chap to be working
there without the uncomfortable feeling that you're just being tolerated
because you're a Siltonian."

"I was thinking," said Mark, "that I was only being tolerated here
because I happened to come with Rowley. It's impossible to visit a place
like this and not regret that one must remain an outsider."

"It depends on what you want to do," said Hathorne. "I want to be a
parson. I'm going up to the Varsity in October, and I am beginning to
wonder what on earth good I shall be at the end of it all."

He gave Mark an opportunity to comment on this announcement; but Mark
did not know what to say and remained silent.

"I see you're not in the mood to be communicative," Hathorne went on
with a smile. "I don't blame you. It's impossible to be communicative in
this place; but some time, when I'm down at the Mission again, I'd like
to have what is called a heart-to-heart talk. That was a good boundary.
We shall win quite comfortably. So long!"

The tall, fair youth passed on; and although Mark never had that
heart-to-heart talk with him in the Mission, because he was killed in a
mountaineering accident in Switzerland that August, the memory of him
sitting there under the oak tree on that fine summer afternoon remained
with Mark for ever; and after that brief conversation he lost most of
his shyness, so that he came to enjoy his visits to Silchester as much
as the Missioner himself did.

As the new church drew near its completion, Mark apprehended why Father
Rowley attached so much importance to as much of the money for it as
possible coming directly from Silchester. He apprehended how the
Missioner felt that he was building Silchester in a Chatsea slum; and
from that moment that landscape like a mirage of the sunlight, that
landscape into which he had been unable to fit himself when he first
beheld it became his own, for now beyond the chimneypots he could always
see the bald hills of Berkshire and the trees and towers of Silchester,
and at the end of all the meanest alleys there were cattle in the
meadows and birds in the air above.

Silchester was not the only place that Mark visited with Father Rowley.
It became a recognized custom for him to travel up to London whenever
the Missioner was preaching, and in London he was once mor