It would be giving a false impression to say that Mrs. Collingwood had enjoyed herself. She took a holiday like medicine, with a view to its after-effects, in order to enable her to return with renewed vigour to the battle with immoral books and people who were not helpful and did not live in closes. In order to attain this end as fully as possible she had spent all her time out of doors, taking long strolls from breakfast till lunch, and a walk with her husband from lunch till tea, on the recognised plan that the best rest for a tired mind is to strenuously overtire the body also. She had continually looked at the beauties of nature also as part of the prescription, and had read a little Wordsworth as she would read a guide-book in a foreign town. In the evening, and sometimes if it was exceedingly wet, she would work, and had produced three G. F. S. leaflets, one of which embodied her lecture on the Downward Tendencies of Modern Fiction. Another was called No Parleyings with the Enemy. In fact, when she and her husband returned, she might be said to be a match for anything. Jack arrived on a brilliant September afternoon, and, sending his luggage on, walked himself. The old, quaint town seemed to his brisker London eye to be dozing on as peacefully as ever, in a sort of tranquil mediæval drowsiness. From the station, which was on a hill, he could see across the cup-shaped hollow in which lay the red-tiled town. There were no new houses on the way down, and the names above all the old ones were the same. The man who had cut his hair when he was a child stood, as he had always stood, at his door, looking on to the street, with a pair of scissors stuck into the pocket of his white apron, neither balder nor stouter than he used to be. It had always been a matter of wonder to Jack how a man with so bald a head dare have his windows filled full of infallible hair-preservers, but perhaps he was a cynic, and traded with amusement on the fathomless credulity of man. The very slope of the high street seemed designed for a leisurely folk; it was too steep for a horse to trot either up or down, and the foot-passengers ascended softly like bubbles arising through water, and descended with the same equable motion like pebbles sinking in the sea. Half-way down he branched off through a covered passage leading under a house into the close, and there, too, time seemed to have stood still. A few nursery-maids wheeled contented babies up and down its paths, and children were playing among the grave-stones; the gray pinnacled west front seemed the incarnation of stability. As always, the place asserted its instant charm over him; for the moment as he passed through the grave-yard into the close he would have asked nothing better than to say an eternal good-bye to the froth and bubble of the world and turn the key on his ambitions. It would be necessary, he reflected, to be rid of them, else in a week or