om this deep apprehension of
the truth. There were hours when he was haunted by the spectres of his
own unregenerate action, when he regretted mistakes, when he searched
for occupation; but he grew to see that even these sad hours only
brought out for him, with deeper and clearer significance, the
essential truth of the vision, which did indeed transform his life.
When he was ill, anxious, overwrought, he grew to feel that he was
being held quietly back for a season; and it led to a certain
deliberate disentangling of himself from the lesser human relations,
from a consciousness that his appointed work was not here, but that he
was set apart and consecrated for a particular work, the work of
apprehending and discerning, of interpreting and expressing, the vast
design of life; it represented itself to him in an image of children
wandering in fields and meadows, just observing the detail and the
petty connection of objects, the hedgerow, the stream appearing in
certain familiar places, by ford or bridge, the trees that loomed high
over the nearer orchard, and seemed part of it. And then one of these
children, he thought, might, on a day of surprises, be taken up to the
belfry of the old church-tower in the village, and out upon the roof.
Then in a moment the plan, the design of all would be made clear, the
hidden connection revealed. Those great towering elms, that rose in
soft masses above the orchard, were in reality nothing but the elms
that the child knew so well from the other side, that overhung his own
familiar garden. There, among the willows, the stream passed from ford
to bridge, and on again, circling in loops and curves. The village
would be a different place after that, not known by an empirical
experience, but apprehended as a construction, as a settled design,
where each field and garden had its appointed place.

And so Hugh, with a great effort of utter resignation, a resignation
which had something passionate and eager about it, cast himself into
the Father's hands, and prayed that he might no longer do anything but
discern and follow the path that was prepared for him. Long and late
these thoughts haunted him; but when he went at last through the silent
house to his own room, it was with a sense that he was reposing in
perfect trustfulness upon the will of One who, whether He led him
forward or held him back, knew with a deep and loving tenderness the
thing that he, and he only, could do in the gre