he accidents of life, the inevitable harsh
happenings in the great tragedy of Nature. They could not be helped, and
there was nothing more to be said.

He had bestowed much more attention upon what the priest had said the
previous evening. He passed in review all the glowing tributes Father
Forbes had paid to Celia. They warmed his senses as he recalled them,
but they also, in a curious, indefinite way, caused him uneasiness.
There had been a personal fervor about them which was something more
than priestly. He remembered how the priest had turned pale and faltered
when the question whether Celia would escape the general doom of her
family came up. It was not a merely pastoral agitation that, he felt
sure.

A hundred obscure hints, doubts, stray little suspicions, crowded upward
together in his thoughts. It became apparent to him now that from the
outset he had been conscious of something queer--yes, from that very
first day when he saw the priest and Celia together, and noted their
glance of recognition inside the house of death. He realized now, upon
reflection, that the tone of other people, his own parishioners and his
casual acquaintances in Octavius alike, had always had a certain note of
reservation in it when it touched upon Miss Madden. Her running in and
out of the pastorate at all hours, the way the priest patted her on
the shoulder before others, the obvious dislike the priest's ugly old
housekeeper bore her, the astonishing freedom of their talk with each
other--these dark memories loomed forth out of a mass of sinister
conjecture.

He could bear the uncertainty no longer. Was it indeed not entirely his
own fault that it had existed thus long? No man with the spirit of a
mouse would have shilly-shallied in this preposterous fashion, week
after week, with the fever of a beautiful woman's kiss in his blood, and
the woman herself living only round the corner. The whole world had been
as good as offered to him--a bewildering world of wealth and beauty and
spiritual exaltation and love--and he, like a weak fool, had waited for
it to be brought to him on a salver, as it were, and actually forced
upon his acceptance! "That is my failing," he reflected; "these
miserable ecclesiastical bandages of mine have dwarfed my manly side.
The meanest of Thurston's clerks would have shown a more adventurous
spirit and a bolder nerve. If I do not act at once, with courage and
resolution, everything will be lost. Already she