ng myself up and stopping at nothing in order to be made a bishop,
and then when I have the mitre at last of appearing in my true colours."

"Our Protestant brethren think that is what many of our right reverend
fathers in God do now," the Rector laughed.

These discussions might have continued for ever without taking Mark any
further. His failure to experience Oxford had deprived him of the
opportunity to whet his opinions upon the grindstone of debate, and
there had been no time for academic argument in the three years of
Keppel Street. In Wych-on-the-Wold there never seemed much else to do
but argue. It was one of the effects of leaving, or rather of seeing
destroyed, a society that was obviously performing useful work and
returning to a society that, so far as Mark could observe performed no
kind of work whatever. He was loath to criticize the Rector; but he felt
that he was moving along in a rut that might at any moment deepen to a
chasm in which he would be spiritually lost. He seemed to be taking his
priestly responsibilities too lightly, to be content with gratifying his
own desire to worship Almighty God without troubling about his
parishioners. Mark did not like to make any suggestions about parochial
work, because he was afraid of the Rector's retorting with an implied
criticism of St. Agnes'; and that would have involved him in a bitter
argument for which he would afterward be sorry. Nor was it only in his
missionary duties that he felt his old friend was allowing himself to
rust. Three years ago the Rector had said a daily Mass. Now he was
content with one on Thursdays except on festivals. Mark began to take
walks far afield, which was a sign of irritation with the inaction of
the life round him rather than the expression of an interest in the life
beyond. On one of these walks he found himself at Wield in the diocese
of Kidderminster thirty miles or more away from home. He had spent the
night in a remote Cotswold village, and all the morning he had been
travelling through the level vale of Wield which, beautiful at the time
of blossom, was now at midsummer a landscape without line, monotonously
green, prosperous and complacent. While he was eating his bread and
cheese at the public bar of the principal inn, he picked up one of the
local newspapers and reading it, as one so often reads in such
surroundings, with much greater particularity than the journal of a
metropolis, he came upon the following letter: