on within him, there would flash little pictures of
Murewell. The green, with the sun on the house-fronts, the awning
over the village shop, the vane on the old 'Manor-house,' the familiar
figures at the doors; his church, with every figure in the Sunday
congregation as clear to him as though he were that moment in the
pulpit; the children he had taught, the sick he had nursed, this or that
weather-beaten or brutalized peasant whose history he knew, whose tragic
secrets he had learnt--all these memories and images clung about him
as though with ghostly hands, asking--'Why will you desert us? You are
ours--stay with us!'

Then his thoughts would run over the future, dwelling, with a tense,
realistic sharpness, on every detail which lay before him---the
arrangements with his _locum tenens_, the interview with the Bishop, the
parting with the rectory. It even occurred to him to wonder what must be
done with Martha and his mother's cottage.

His mother? As he thought of her a wave of unutterable longing rose
and broke. The difficult tears stood in his eyes. He had a strange
conviction that at this crisis of his life, she of all human beings
would have understood him best.

When would the Squire know? He pictured the interview with him,
divining, with the same abnormal clearness of inward vision Mr.
Wendover's start of mingled triumph and impatience--triumph in the new
recruit, impatience with the Quixotic folly which could lead a man
to look upon orthodox dogma as a thing real enough to be publicly
renounced, or clerical pledges as more than form of words. So henceforth
he was on the same side with the Squire, held by an indiscriminating
world as bound to the same negations, the same hostilities! The thought
roused in him a sudden fierceness of moral repugnance. The Squire and
Edward Langham--they were the only sceptics of whom he had ever had
close and personal experience. And with all his old affection for
Langham, all his frank sense of pliancy in the Squire's hands,--yet in
this strait of life how he shrinks from them both!--souls at war with
life and man, without holiness, without perfume!

Is it the law of things? 'Once loosen a man's _religio_, once fling away
the old binding elements, the old traditional restraints which have made
him what he is, and moral deterioration is certain.' How often he has
heard it said! How often he has endorsed it! Is it true? His heart grows
cold within him. What good man can ever