grey house melted; all the hollow-land flickered with green flames and the willows turned to smoke. Then let the world dissolve! If she loved him, she was the world.

But he must know quickly. If she did not love him, then every instant imparadised in this enclosure was an outrage upon time. If she did not love him, that moment in which he had known he loved her must not be marred by the least change in this landscape, by not so much as the sound of leaf or twig nor the wink of a passing bird. Mark leapt up from the stone seat and hurried back to the Manor.

"I wonder, Lord Ladingford, if you could let me have the car at once? I've suddenly remembered that I promised to do something in Wychford this afternoon. May I write you my decision to-night? I'm so very deeply grateful for the opportunity you have given me. I shall let you know definitely to-night."

Mark, who had been dazed by the rapidity of the drive from Wych-on-the-Wold to Caldecott, was dismayed by the slowness of the drive back from Caldecott to Wychford. There were moments when the hedges and trees ahead of them seemed to be running away from the car. Mark's nerves were strung to such a pitch of acute perceptiveness that he was able to think he was counting the twigs in the hedgerows which ordinarily at the pace he was being driven would have been a purple blur. It was striking four when the car pulled up by the corner of the street that led to the Rectory. Mark saw, to his joy, that Pauline was walking in the garden; and, as he hurried towards her, it struck him that she ought not to be wandering about without a hat in this raging wind. But when he reached her side and looked into her face and tried to ask his question, he realized that it was still the same windless and mellow afternoon and that his own heart and the blackbirds in the shrubbery were the only moving things.

"Pauline, I've been offered the living of Caldecott." "Oh, Mark dear, it's the most perfect place. It's exquisite, Mark. Oh, and I'd love you to be a vicar. Oh, do take it, Mark, do take it. Oh, Mark, how frightfully exciting! Oh, I must tell darling father. He'll send

you cartloads of bulbs for your garden, and I'll come and help you plant them.”

"Will you, Pauline?"

She looked at him, and in her sudden immobility it seemed to him that she was fading away into this windless February afternoon, fading out of this garden, fading out of that hollow-land, fading out of his life.

"Pauline, Pauline! You've guessed that I love you! Will you marry me, Pauline?”

"Mark, dear, dear Mark, I can't bear to hurt you, but I don't love you in that way. I couldn't ever love you in that way. If I could, I would, because you're such a dear. And it isn't that I don't want to, Mark. It's simply that I can't."

"Darling Pauline," said Mark gently, "I know that you would if you could, because you are love itself. And, darling Pauline, forgive my clumsy selfishness in having hurt you by asking for something that you couldn't give, for I do understand what a grief that must be to you. Darling Pauline, I don't expect I look as if I understood, but I do. Don't worry about me, please; I beg you not to worry. I ought to have known you couldn't love me, but I was suddenly dazzled and I lost all my judgment, and that's why I've hurt you in this clumsy way.'

"Mark, don't talk about hurting me, when it's I who have hurt you."

"But you haven't hurt me, my dear. If you had been able to love me, I should have been so happy that I think my very pulses would have turned to bells and I should have gone walking about like a chiming steeple. But for one hour I had in my heart the thought that you might love me, and that hour will be my whole life of love."

"But, Mark, you won't refuse the living? Because that would make me more unhappy than ever.'

"Pauline, please don't say that. If you want to be kind to me, I entreat you not to consider Caldecott. If you had promised to marry me, I should have accepted it, because I should have felt that with you it would have been the right place for us to be. But without you it would be the wrong place for me. I shouldn't be happy there and therefore I shouldn't be a good priest. I have another

offer from London to go to St. Cyprian's, which is of all others the church I should like to serve as a priest. Therefore I shall do better there. God bless you, darling Pauline. I shall go to London to-morrow. I'll come in and say good-bye to your mother and father now." "But you'll go on being my oldest friend, Mark?" "Why, of course, foolish little one, always."

CHAPTER XVII

ST. CYPRIAN'S, SOUTH KENSINGTON

A CLERICAL Wit once said that Drogo Mortemer had built up St. Cyprian's on the same lines as those on which his father had once upon a time built up the business of Hadley and Mortemer in Oxford Street; and if the implied sneer had been kept out, that would have been well observed. There was no doubt that Mortemer's success was largely due to the skilful way in which he provided people with what he wanted them to want. In defence of his system he might have pleaded that Catholicism itself was a sublimation of universal providing; and after twelve years' work Mortemer would have been justified in claiming that the appeal of Anglo-Catholicism was stronger at St. Cyprian's than anywhere else. He could have urged that except as a missionary force in slums. the system of religion that he and many others professed had never been taken seriously either by the press, the public, or the authorities, until he had shown the way to get it accepted as a system that could not be laughed at. He did not claim to be a great spiritual force himself. In fact he made a habit of deprecating too much emphasis upon the spiritual force in the individual priest as liable to foster the congregationalism that was the real bane of the Church of England. If he attacked a bishop (and Mortemer's cleverness was shown not least in the way he always hit first any bishop whom he saw rolling up his lawn sleeves to hit him), he attacked him on his worldly side. In a way it was the same school of boxing as Moxon-Hughes's, but where Moxon-Hughes feinted at his man with an artist Mortemer floored him with a duke. In twelve years he had made St. Cyprian's so strong a force that he was nearly always able to drive a bargain with any bishop of the Southern Province; for

if one of them objected to the services of a church in his diocese which were winked at in another, St. Cyprian's always went one better and set an example of rapid advance that embarrassed the whole of the episcopate. If Mortemer had been asked what was the secret of his success, he would have disclaimed his personal influence and ascribed most of it to his assistant clergy. This was to some extent true; but the credit for choosing those young priests belonged to Mortemer, and he chose them so well that he was able to leave his parish for as often and as long as he wished and be sure that during the whole of his absence it would be as efficiently managed as if he were there. This ubiquity of Mortemer's was a wonderful weapon. He disapproved of letters and always relied on the personal interview. There were occasions, as in the desertion of Whitmore and Hett, when all his efforts were fruitless; but the successes far outnumbered the failures, and the gravest crises were weathered by that dapper little priest with his courtesy that was so faintly tinged with irony, with his slightly mincing and affected manner that concealed an infrangible resolution, and last but no means least with that income of nearly twenty thousand pounds a year. One really could not blame the bishops for beginning to think that there might be something in Anglo-Catholicism after all, especially when Mortemer spoke of his churchwarden the Duke of Birmingham, or of how Lord So-and-so had had to give up acting as sidesman since he became Under-Secretary for Foreign Affairs. At this rate a future Prime Minister might be handing the plate of St. Cyprian's, and without undue Erastianism. . .

But Mortemer's greatest triumph was when he secured the consecration of his senior assistant-priest to the see of Rarotonga. Even the popular press was thrilled by such a clerical leap, and for two days it shed a romantic glamour over the Church as a career. But that particular young priest was worthy to be a bishop, and Mortemer's placing was allowed on all sides to be accurate.

When Mark went to St. Cyprian's, the senior curate was the Reverend Michael Heriot, tall, austere, fastidious, scholarly, and what is called enigmatic. He had been