"I'm glad you've found your way to St. Teresa's. We don't often get such a strong contingent from the other side." By "the other side" Mr. Reed meant Middlesex, but to Audrey the phrase was insidiously controversial. She determined to take her stand once and for all. "I'm afraid my heterodoxy is incorrigible. So I should say is Mr. Langley Wyndham's." The vicar raised his eyebrows in mild surprise. "I don't know why _he_ came--unless it was for old acquaintance' sake." "Ah! you knew him, didn't you? Do tell me about him. He's public property, you know." "I daresay, but I have no right to discuss him. We hardly ever meet now; if we did we shouldn't agree. We are enigmas to each other." "Yes," she said meditatively, and with a faint reproduction of Wyndham's manner, "I should say you would be. He belongs so essentially to the present, don't you think?" Flaxman Reed flushed painfully. "And I to the past--is that what you mean?" "Yes, I think I do." "You may be right. I suppose he is very modern--a decadent who would rather die with his day than live an hour behind it--who can't see that the future may have more kindred with the past than with the present. Mind you, I'm not talking of him, but of his school." "Then you read him? Of course--everybody reads him." "I've not much time for any reading that lies outside my work. But I read his first book when it came out. Is it from him you get what you call your heterodoxy?" "No. You have to think these things out for yourself." Audrey was led into making this statement simply by the desire to please. That eternally feminine instinct told her that at the moment she would be most interesting to Flaxman Reed in the character of a forlorn sceptic. His face sharpened with a sudden distrust. "What, have _you_ got the malady of the century--the disease of thought? Surely this is something new?" "It is. One can't go on for ever in the old grooves. One must think." "Yes; that curse is laid upon us for our sins." Audrey smiled a bitter smile, as much as to say that she must have committed some awful crime to be so tormented with intellect as she was. "I suppose," he continued guilelessly, "every earnest mind must go through this sooner or later." "Yes, but I've come out on what you call the other side. I can't go back, can I?" "No; but you can go round." Audrey shook her head sadly, feeling all the time how nice it was to be taken seriously. "Why not? Why not compromise? What is life but compromise? What else is my own position as an Anglican priest? I daresay you know that my heart is not altogether with the Church I serve?" He checked himself; he had not meant to strike this personal note. And how could he explain the yearning of his heart for the great heart of the Mother-church? This would have been possible last year at Oxford, but not now. "I tell you this because I feel that it might perhaps help you."