the new forces, which life and thought had been calling into
being. The words of St. Augustine which he had read to Catherine taken
in a strange new sense, came back to him--'Commend to the keeping of the
Truth whatever the Truth hath given thee, and thou shalt lose nothing!'

Was it the summons of Truth which was rending the whole nature in this
way?

Robert stood still, and with his hands locked behind him, and his face
turned like the face of a blind man toward a world of which it saw
nothing, went through a desperate catechism of himself.

'_Do I believe in God?_ Surely, surely! "Though He slay me yet will
I trust in Him!" _Do I believe in Christ?_ Yes,--in the teacher, the
martyr, the symbol to us Westerns of all things heavenly and abiding,
the image and pledge of the invisible life of the spirit--with all my
soul and all my mind!'

'_But in the Man-God_, the Word from Eternity,--in a wonder-working
Christ, in a risen and ascended Jesus, in the living Intercessor and
Mediator for the lives of His doomed brethren?'

He waited, conscious that it was the crisis of his history, and there
rose in him, as though articulated one by one by an audible voice, words
of irrevocable meaning.

'Every human soul in which the voice of God makes itself felt, enjoys,
equally with Jesus of Nazareth, the divine sonship, and "_miracles do
not happen!_"'

It was done. He felt for the moment as Bunyan did after his lesser
defeat.

'Now was the battle won, and down fell I as a bird that is shot from the
top of a tree into great guilt and fearful despair. Thus getting out of
my bed I went moping in the field; but God knows with as heavy an heart
as mortal man I think could bear, where for the space of two hours I was
like a man bereft of life.'

All these years of happy spiritual certainty, of rejoicing oneness with
Christ, to end in this wreck and loss! Was not this indeed '_il gran
rifiuto?_' the greatest of which human daring is capable?

The lane darkened round him. Not a soul was in sight. The only sounds
were the sounds of a gently breathing nature, sounds of birds and
swaying branches and intermittent gusts of air rustling through the
gorse and the drifts of last year's leaves in the wood beside him. He
moved mechanically onward, and presently, after the first flutter of
desolate terror had passed away, with a new inrushing sense which seemed
to him a sense of liberty--of infinite expansion.

Suddenly the trees before