ple turned to each other.

Scrope stood for a moment or so and then sat down again.

For a time he could think only of Eleanor.... He watched the two young
people as they went eastward. As they walked their shoulders and elbows
bumped amicably together.

(10)

Presently he sought to resume the interrupted thread of his thoughts.
He knew that he had been dealing with some very tremendous and urgent
problem when Eleanor had appeared. Then he remembered that Eleanor at
the time of her approach had seemed to be a solution rather than an
interruption. Well, she had her own life. She was making her own life.
Instead of solving his problems she was solving her own. God bless those
dear grave children! They were nearer the elemental things than he was.
That eastward path led to Victoria--and thence to a very probable death.
The lad was in the infantry and going straight into the trenches.

Love, death, God; this war was bringing the whole world back to
elemental things, to heroic things. The years of comedy and comfort were
at an end in Europe; the age of steel and want was here. And he had been
thinking--What had he been thinking?

He mused, and the scheme of his perplexities reshaped itself in his
mind. But at that time he did not realize that a powerful new light
was falling upon it now, cast by the tragic illumination of these young
lovers whose love began with a parting. He did not see how reality had
come to all things through that one intense reality. He reverted to
the question as he had put it to himself, before first he recognized
Eleanor. Did he believe in God? Should he go on with this Sunderbund
adventure in which he no longer believed? Should he play for safety and
comfort, trusting to God's toleration? Or go back to his family and warn
them of the years of struggle and poverty his renunciation cast upon
them?

Somehow Lady Sunderbund's chapel was very remote and flimsy now, and the
hardships of poverty seemed less black than the hardship of a youthful
death.

Did he believe in God? Again he put that fundamental question to
himself.

He sat very still in the sunset peace, with his eyes upon the steel
mirror of the waters. The question seemed to fill the whole scene, to
wait, even as the water and sky and the windless trees were waiting....

And then by imperceptible degrees there grew in Scrope's mind the
persuasion that he was in the presence of the living God. This time
there was no vision of ange