Brought face to face with this solemn question of life or death, Cyril discovered that existence was not altogether worthless. He, who a little time ago had courted death, had now no desire to die. There were mysteries that he wanted to solve in this life, before he went to investigate the awful mystery beyond it. He wanted to stand face to face with Beatrix Harefield once more. He wanted to know whether it was indeed for love of him she had at the last moment jilted his cousin. He wanted to find some stronger proof of her innocence than the sudden conviction that had flashed into his mind when he looked into her steadfast eyes, and saw scorn of his weak doubts, and fondest love for himself, at war in her soul. While he lived there was always a chance, however remote, of his discovering the truth. While he lived there was always the possibility that Beatrix and he might meet. She was not his cousin’s wife. Fate had spared him that last bitterness. He could think of her without sin. So he came back to Little Yafford, to his old rooms, his old friends, his old ways, and the old quietly busy life which seemed so easy after his vain endeavour to cleanse that Augean stable, an overcrowded manufacturing town. ‘I never feel as if I had too much work to do, so long as it is work that can be done,’ he said to the gentle Vicar. ‘To grapple with impossibilities and feel one’s self being daily worsted! That is the trial.’ There were two of his parishioners at Bridford whom Cyril could not be content to leave behind him. Those were Emmanuel Joyce and his mother. Emmanuel’s gratitude for the man who had risked his life to save him had done what argument and teaching might never have accomplished. Emmanuel was now a conscientious conforming Christian. He believed, as the leper believed, because he had been saved. The conduct of one Christian man opened his heart to receive the sublime mystery of a Redeemer who was more than man. He went to the altar without one lurking doubt. He made himself like a little child, and confessed that all the learning he had been so proud of was nothing, when weighed against his friend and teacher’s one act of Christian self-abnegation. ‘What was I that you should sacrifice yourself for me?’ he said. ‘When man can be so generous I will no longer refuse to believe that God can suffer and die for sinners.’ ‘I would have you believe upon better grounds than any friendly act of mine,’ said Cyril. ‘I have been face to face with death,’ answered Joyce. ‘Men learn strange things on their deathbeds. A death-bed repentance may be a poor thing, but a death-bed revelation may accomplish what a life of study could not do.’ And then Emmanuel, being by nature an enthusiast, talked wildly of the visions of his bed of pain--the cloud-curtain that had been lifted from the invisible world--the wonders that he had seen and heard in that mysterious border-land between life and death. Cyril asked no more than a simple unquestioning belief.