em from their incongruous history and consecrate them over
again. He often found them helpful when he sought to lift his spirit,
and in any special matter a special comfort. He bent for ten minutes
before a Crucifixion, and then hastened back to his place. Only one
reflection corrected the vigourous satisfaction with which he thought
out Hilda's proposition. That disturbed him in the middle of it, and
took the somewhat irrelevant form of a speculation as to whether the
events of their last meeting should have had any place in his Thursday
confession. He was able to find almost at once a conscientious negative
for it, and it did not recur again.

He got up reluctantly when the Mission bell sounded, and indeed he had
come to the end of a very absorbing interest. His decision was final
against Hilda's scheme. His worn experience cried out at the sacrifice
in it without the illumination--which it would certainly lack--of
religious faith. She confessed to the lack, and that was all she had to
say about her motive, which, of course, placed him at an immense
disadvantage in considering it. But the question then descended to
another plane, became merely a doubt as to the most useful employment of
energy, and that doubt nobody could entertain long, nobody of reasonable
breadth of view, who had ever seen her expressing the ideals of the
stage. Arnold did his best to ward off all consideration which he could
suspect of a personal origin, but his inveterate self-sacrifice slipped
in and counted, naturally enough, under another guise, counted against
her staying.

He went to his room and wrote to Hilda at once, the kindest, simplest of
letters, but conveying a definitely negative note. He would have been
perhaps more guarded, but it was so plainly his last word to her;
Llewellyn Stanhope was proclaiming the departure of his people in ten
days' time upon every blank wall. So he gave himself a little latitude,
he let in an undercurrent of gentle reminiscence, of serious assurance
as to the difference she had made. And when he had finally bade her
begone to the light and fulness of her own life and fastened up his
letter, he deliberately lifted it to his lips, and placed a trembling,
awkward kiss upon it, like the kiss of an old man, perfunctory, yet
bearing a tender intention.

The Livingstones and Duff Lindsay had come back, the people from Surrey
having been sped upon their way to the Far East. Stephen remembered with
more than h