Since Gilbert’s return from England to take up his father’s estates the priest had sought, if anything, to withdraw his influence. He had carefully prepared and trained a mind, hoping that with a right prejudice it might go on to find its own perfection. And instead of this—well, Gilbert was what he was now. It was the path which the priest had chosen deliberately, carefully, not without conflict—and to what had it led? The tool which he might have fashioned for such an hour of need as this was useless. To what end, then, had he abstained from moulding that beloved spirit? All these years, when he had sought to divert allegiance from himself, he had been following an impossible and a visionary ideal. And now it was too late. And he loved Gilbert so dearly! Above all others he would fain have called him his son; it was for that very reason that he had kept himself apart from him. And this son would soon be fighting in a holy war, living in hourly danger of death, perhaps dying alone, unreconciled to the Church. His was not only the yearning of the priest, but of the childless man also. What would he not give in exchange for Gilbert’s soul, if only it might be granted to him? Yes, awful though they were, those words, he could use them. . . . For Gilbert’s sake he was willing to be himself a castaway. His hands slid from his face and knitted themselves together in front of him on the table, and his head fell forward on to them. If it were possible. . . . God! God! if it were possible. . . . The rain beat still more violently upon the panes, but in the room was a long stillness like death, and in that stillness, while his body lay bowed over the table, the priest’s will, rising into regions not subject to space and time, made at last the supreme act of surrender, and yielded up to the Divine Purpose, not its own eternal welfare, but that of its best beloved. * * * * * * When he came back to the world of sense, M. des Graves discovered himself leaning back in his chair, his hands no longer clenched in entreaty but lying open on the table, palms uppermost, in a gesture of offering. He remained so for a moment, and putting up a hand to his forehead, found it dripping with sweat. After that he sat a long time motionless, looking at the crucifix which stood in front of him. And in his mind, not as a sudden after-revelation, but quite clear and developed, as if he had brought it back from the mysterious places in which he had been, was the sense that the circumstances for Gilbert’s salvation existed, ready and waiting, if only he could be brought to use them.