ce of twenty-five. It made
Mark's proposed monastic life appear amateurish; and when he was back in
the matchboarded guest-room the impulse to abandon his project was
revised. Yet he felt it would be wrong to return to Wych-on-the-Wold.
The impulse to come here, though sudden, had been very strong, and to
give it up without trial might mean the loss of an experience that one
day he should regret. The opinion of Sir Charles Horner might or might
not be well founded; but it was bound to be a prejudiced opinion,
because by constituting himself to the extent he had a patron of the
Order he must involuntarily expect that it should be conducted according
to his views. Sir Charles himself, seen in perspective, was a tolerably
ridiculous figure, too much occupied with the paraphernalia of worship,
too well pleased with himself, a man of rank and wealth who judged by
severe standards was an old maid, and like all old maids critical, but
not creative.

CHAPTER XXIV

THE ORDER OF ST. GEORGE

The Order of St. George was started by the Reverend Edward Burrowes six
years before Sir Charles Horner's gift of land for a Mother House led
him to suppose that he had made his foundation a permanent factor in the
religious life of England.

Edward Burrowes was the only son of a band-master in the Royal Artillery
who at an impressionable moment in the life of his son was stationed at
Malta. The religious atmosphere of Malta combined with the romantic
associations of chivalry and the influence of his mother determined the
boy's future. The band-master was puzzled and irritated by his son's
ecclesiastical bias. He thought that so much church-going argued an
unhealthy preoccupation, and as for Edward's rhapsodies about the
Auberge of Castile, which sheltered the Messes of the Royal Artillery
and the Royal Engineers, they made him sick, to use his own expression.

"You make me sick, Ted," he used to declare. "The sooner I get quit of
Malta and quartered at Woolwich again, the better I shall be pleased."

When at last the band-master was moved to Woolwich, he hoped that the
effect of such prosaic surroundings would put an end to Ted's mooning,
and that he would settle down to a career more likely to reward him in
this world rather than in that ambiguous world beyond to which his
dreams aspired. Edward, who was by this time seventeen and who had so
far submitted to his father's wishes as to be working in a solicitor's
office, found t