alternatives were brutal! This
was the centre of his world, the only spot where so lonely a man could
hope to feel even the semblance of home; a thousand little threads
tethered him to his church, his parishioners, and this house--for, to
live on here if he gave up his church was out of the question. But his
chief feeling was a bewildered anger that for doing what seemed to him
his duty, he should be attacked by his parishioners.

A passion of desire to know what they really thought and felt--these
parishioners of his, whom he had befriended, and for whom he had worked
so long--beset him now, and he went out. But the absurdity of his quest
struck him before he had gone the length of the Square. One could not
go to people and say: "Stand and deliver me your inmost judgments." And
suddenly he was aware of how far away he really was from them. Through
all his ministrations had he ever come to know their hearts? And now, in
this dire necessity for knowledge, there seemed no way of getting it.
He went at random into a stationer's shop; the shopman sang bass in his
choir. They had met Sunday after Sunday for the last seven years. But
when, with this itch for intimate knowledge on him, he saw the man
behind the counter, it was as if he were looking on him for the first
time. The Russian proverb, "The heart of another is a dark forest,"
gashed into his mind, while he said:

"Well, Hodson, what news of your son?"

"Nothing more, Mr. Pierson, thank you, sir, nothing more at present."

And it seemed to Pierson, gazing at the man's face clothed in a short,
grizzling beard cut rather like his own, that he must be thinking: 'Ah!
sir, but what news of your daughter?' No one would ever tell him to his
face what he was thinking. And buying two pencils, he went out. On the
other side of the road was a bird-fancier's shop, kept by a woman whose
husband had been taken for the Army. She was not friendly towards him,
for it was known to her that he had expostulated with her husband for
keeping larks, and other wild birds. And quite deliberately he crossed
the road, and stood looking in at the window, with the morbid hope that
from this unfriendly one he might hear truth. She was in her shop, and
came to the door.

"Have you any news of your husband, Mrs. Cherry?"

"No, Mr. Pierson, I 'ave not; not this week."

"He hasn't gone out yet?"

"No, Mr. Pierson; 'e 'as not."

There was no expression on her face, perfectly blank it was--Pi