s and the only subject
on which he ever showed animation was a projected holiday in
Switzerland. He once alluded to the possibility of going to Groombridge
for the shooting.

At first he had not allowed Father Marny to take any of his now painful
work among the people he was so soon to leave, but, after a week or two,
he acquiesced. What was the use when he was to leave them for good and
all? It were better they should learn at once to get on without him.
Father Marny, in passionate sympathy, was ready to work himself to death
and acknowledge no fatigue. It was easy to conceal fatigue or anything
else from Mark in his preoccupied state of mind. He showed no interest
when Lord Lofton wrote him a most warmly and tactfully expressed letter
of welcome, in which he told the coming chaplain that he must not
suppose there was not work in plenty to be done for souls in the
country.

"Humbugging old men and women who want pensions and soup and blankets!"
Mark said with unusual irritation, as he flung the letter to his friend.

But to the curate Mark was as much above criticism as a martyr at the
foot of the gallows.

Strangely enough, the first break into this moral fog that was settling
down in his spiritual world was, of all unlikely things, the letter from
Edmund Grosse.

When he got Edmund's letter Mark was sulking--there is no other word for
it--over his answer to Lord Lofton, which ought to have gone several
days ago. Of course he was bound by his mission oath to go where he was
placed, but the authorities might at least have waited to hear from him
before handing him over as if he were a parcel or a Jesuit. He read
Edmund's cramped writing with a little difficulty, and then threw the
three sheets it covered on to the table with a bang, and jumped up.

"Dash it!" he cried, "this is rather too much."

He did not stop to think that Edmund could not have been so idiotic as
to write that letter if he had known of the state of the case between
him and Miss Dexter. It only seemed at the moment that it was another
instance of cruelty and utter unfairness, part of the same treatment he
was receiving, which expected a man to be a plaster saint with no
thought for himself, no natural feelings, no sense of his own
reputation! First of all he was to be buried, torn from his friends,
from his work for souls, from the joy of the Good Shepherd seeking the
lost sheep. He was to lose all he loved and for which he had given up
his