o sight.
He had swum up it, he remembered, the silver ripple washing over his
shoulders as he went.

And now those years of monastic peace and storm had come and gone,
sifting and penetrating his soul, washing out from it little by little
the heats and passions with which he had plunged. As he looked back on
himself he was astonished at his old complacent smallness. His figure
appeared down that avenue of years, a tiny passionate thing,
gesticulating, feverish, self-conscious. He remembered his serene
certainty that he was right and Ralph wrong in every touch of friction
between them, his own furious and theatrical outburst at the death of
the Carthusians, his absurd dignity on later occasions. Even in those
first beginnings of peace when the inner life had begun to well up and
envelop him he had been narrow and self-centred; he had despised the
common human life, not understanding that God's Will was as energetic in
the bewildering rush of the current as in the quiet sheltered
back-waters to which he himself had been called. He had been awakened
from that dream by the fall of the Priory, and that to which he opened
his eyes had been forced into his consciousness by the months at home,
when he had had that astringent mingling of the world and the spirit, of
the interpenetration of the inner by the outer. And now for the first
time he stood as a balanced soul between the two, alight with a tranquil
grace within, and not afraid to look at the darkness without. He was
ready now for either life, to go back to the cloister and labour there
for the world at the springs of energy, or to take his place in the new
England and struggle at the tossing surface.

He stood here now by the hurrying turbulent stream, a wider and more
perilous gulf than that that had lain before him as he looked at the
moonlit lake at Overfield and yet over it brooded the same quiet shield
of heaven, gilding the black swift flowing forces with the promise of a
Presence greater than them all.

He stood there long, staring and thinking.

CHAPTER IX

A RELIEF-PARTY

The days that followed were very anxious and troubled ones for Ralph's
friends at Charing. They were dreadful too from their very
uneventfulness.

On the morning following their arrival Chris went off to the Temple to
consult a lawyer that the Lieutenant had recommended to Nicholas, and
brought him back with him an hour later. The first need to be supplied
was their lack of kn