group of Salvationists were singing, lest the
involuntary sympathy of his senses should agitate and enrage him. At
present he had no wish to draw away. He entered the churchyard, and
found the leafy nook with a tombstone where he had often rested. And as
he listened to the rude chanting of verse after verse, tears fell upon
his cheeks.

This sensibility was quite distinct from religious feeling. If the note
of devotion sounding in that simple strain had any effect upon him at
all, it merely intensified his consciousness of pathos as he thought of
the many generations that had worshipped here, living and dying in a
faith which was at best a helpful delusion. He could appreciate the
beautiful aspects of Christianity as a legend, its nobility as a
humanising power, its rich results in literature, its grandeur in
historic retrospect. But at no moment in his life had he felt it as a
spiritual influence. So far from tending in that direction, as he sat
and brooded here in the churchyard, he owed to his fit of tearfulness a
courage which determined him to abandon all religious pretences, and
henceforth trust only to what was sincere in him--his human passion.
The future he had sketched to Sidwell was impossible; the rural
pastorate, the life of moral endeavour which in his excitement had
seemed so nearly a genuine aspiration that it might perchance become
reality--dreams, dreams! He must woo as a man, and trust to fortune for
his escape from a false position. Sidwell should hear nothing more of
clerical projects. He was by this time convinced that she held far less
tenaciously than he had supposed to the special doctrines of the
Church; and, if he had not deceived himself in interpreting her
behaviour, a mutual avowal of love would involve ready consent on her
part to his abandoning a career which--as he would represent it--had
been adopted under a mistaken impulse. He returned to the point which
he had reached when he set forth with the intention of bidding good-bye
to the Warricombes--except that in flinging away hypocrisy he no longer
needed to trample his desires. The change need not be declared till
after a lapse of time. For the present his task was to obtain one more
private interview with Sidwell ere she went to London, or, if that
could not be, somehow to address her in unmistakable language.

The fumes were dispelled from his brain, and as he walked homeward he
plotted and planned with hopeful energy. Sylvia Moorhou