And then for his life. Like Hamlet, he valued that at ‘a pin’s fee.’ He would have asked no better gift from the gods than to die doing his duty--a soldier of the Church militant, struck down in hand-to-hand combat with the enemy. All things which make an earthly lot sweet and valuable to man were lost to this man. He loved, and had renounced the woman he loved. He loved her still, more dearly than ever in separation; and he knew that she was to be the wife of another. Of fortune or advancement in life he had no hope. The Church is a profession few men would choose, desiring either fortune or advancement. He had nothing to live for but his duty, and it would be sweeter to him to die for that than to go on living for it. Every thought of Beatrix Harefield was pain; most painful of all was the thought that she would think him mean and cowardly for his defection. If she was innocent she must scorn him for his doubt of her. If she was guilty she must deem him a coward for refusing her remorse the shelter of his love. He remembered those lines of Moore’s,-- ‘Come rest in this bosom, my own stricken deer, Though the herd have fled from thee, thy home is still here.’ He had been like the herd, and had fled from his beloved in the day of her shadowed fame. He thought of his defection with deepest regret; yet it seemed to him that to have done otherwise would have been to palter with the truth. This burden of sad thought made him more desirous than another man would have been to lose his sense of individual pain in the sorrows of others. Parish priests had gone among the poor of Bridford before Cyril’s time, but none with such a ready ear for their complaints. There was a small household which had a peculiar interest for Cyril. A widow and her son occupied a wretched back room in one of the wretched houses in a blind alley, a festering lane shut from the air and light by the overshadowing bulk of a huge factory, whereof the chimney, although under legal covenant to consume its own smoke, rained showers of blacks upon the surrounding neighbourhood, like the spray from a perennial soot fountain. Nothing could be more squalid than the house in which Mrs. Joyce and Emmanuel Joyce, her son, lived. Their neighbours were no cleaner or tidier than the rest of the community. There was the usual all-pervading odour of fried herrings, and decaying cabbage-leaves. The back yard, nine feet by six, was a horror to stop the nose at. The eye was offended by hideous sights, the ear was outraged by foulest language, and yet in this leper-house there was one spot which the infected air of the place had not tainted. Mrs. Joyce and her son had contrived to impart neatness and order, and even a certain respectability to the one small back room on the ground-floor, which constituted their house and home. Very small were the means by which they had achieved this result, but the result was palpable to every eye.