On the following morning, Blantyre went away. He was absent from Hornham for two days, and it was understood that he had gone to visit Lord Huddersfield. Hamlyn and his doings were not in any way mentioned by the two other clergy. The days of his absence were a time of great unrest and mental debate for Lucy. She was at a crisis in her life. She had definitely come to a moment when she must choose between one thing or another. It is a commonplace of some preachers to say that this moment of definite choice comes to every one at least once in their lives. But the truth of the assertion is at least doubtful. Many people are spared the pain of what is more or less an instantaneous decision. They merge themselves gradually, in this or that direction, the right or the wrong. And they are the more fortunate. For Lucy, however, the tide was at the flood. She must push out upon it and hoist her sail, but whether she should go east or west, run before the wind or beat up into the heart of it--that she must now decide. She had no illusions about her position. To marry James Poyntz meant one thing, to refuse him meant another. In the first place, she wanted to be married. Physically, socially, mentally, she was perfectly aware that she would be happier. Her nature needed the complement of a husband. She was pure, but not virginal, in temperament. She put it to herself that--as she believed--she had a talent for wifehood. Here was a young man who satisfied all her instincts of what was fitting in a man she could marry. She did not love him, but she admired, liked, and respected him. Something of the not unhealthy cynicism--the sane cynicism--of a woman of the world had entered into her. She wasn't a sentimentalist, she didn't think that the "love" of the poet and story-teller was the only thing in the relation of a wife to a husband. She had seen many marriages, she had watched the firm, strong affection that came after marriage, and she saw that it was a good, worthy, and constant thing. She had been much in France. Lady Linquest had friends and relatives among the stately families of the Faubourg St. Germain. Those weddings in France that were decorously arranged by papa and mamma, how did they turn out? On the whole well enough, happily enough. It was only the ignorant lower middle-class of England that thought France was a mighty _lupanar_ and adultery a joke. And in marrying Poyntz she would marry a man whom she was worthy of intellectually. He would satisfy every instinct she possessed--_every instinct but one_. And here, she knew, here lay the root of the whole question. The very strongest influence that can direct and urge any soul towards a holy life is the society and companionship, even the distant contemplation, of a saintly man or woman.