elicate, and yet so elfish, that enchantment walked there
till the night came down, and in the darkness the islanders moved on
their way to church. The pageant was over. But it had stirred two
imaginations. It blazed yet in two hearts. The shock of its coming,
after long hours of storm, had stirred Uniacke and his guest strangely.
And the former, leaving in the rectory parlour the sermon he had
composed, preached extempore on the text, "In the evening there shall be
light."

He began radiantly and with fervour. But some spirit of contradiction
entered his soul as he spoke, impelling him to a more sombre mood that
was yet never cold, but rather impassioned full of imaginative despair.
He was driven on to discourse of the men who will not see light, of the
men who draw thick blinds to shut out light. And then he was led, by the
egoism that so subtly guides even the best among men, to speak of those
fools who, by fostering darkness, think to compel sunshine, as a man may
mix dangerous chemicals in a laboratory, seeking to advance some cause
of science and die in the poisonous fumes of his own devilish brew. Can
good, impulsive and radiant, come out of deliberate evil? Must not a
man care first for his own soul if he would heal the soul of even one
other? Uniacke spoke with a strange and powerful despair on this
subject. He ended in a profound sadness and with the words of one
scourged by doubts.

There was a pause, the shuffle of moving feet. Then the voice of the
clerk announced the closing hymn. It was "Lead, Kindly Light," chosen by
the harmonium player and submitted to Uniacke, who, however, had failed
to notice that it was included in the list of hymns for the day. The
clerk's voice struck on him like a blow. He stared down from the pulpit
and met the upward gaze of his guest. Then he laid his cold hands on the
wooden ledge of the pulpit and turned away his eyes. For he felt as if
Sir Graham must understand the secret that lay in them. The islanders
sang the hymn lustily, bending their heads over their books beneath the
dull oil lamps that filled the church with a dingy yellow twilight.
Alone, at the back of the building, the mad Skipper stood up by the
belfry door and stared straight before him as if he watched. And
Uniacke's trouble increased, seeming to walk in the familiar music which
had been whistled by Jack Pringle as he swarmed to the mast-head, or
turned into his bunk at night far out at sea. Sir Graham had