But neither Arthur nor Hugh thought of their present vocations in their present form as their lives’ work; Arthur, at any rate, had not the slightest intention, as events proved, of plucking the rewards which his profession as schoolmaster was soon to offer him, and when headmasterships came within his reach he did not put his hand out to them. Hugh’s case was only a little different; the direct service of God was now his choice and his passion, but as evolution of that progressed in him, it took him out of the English Church altogether. No one ever questioned that his joining the Roman communion and taking orders there was anything but a matter of irresistible conviction with him, but what would have happened had that conviction taken hold on him before my father’s death it is impossible to say. I cannot imagine any human relation, any _pietas_ restraining Hugh when he had the firm belief that it was by divine guidance that he so acted: on the other hand I cannot imagine what the effect on my father would have been; whether he could have beaten down his own will in the matter, as my mother did, and have accepted this without reserve at all, or whether it would have been to him, as the death of Martin had been, an event unadjustable, unbridgable, unintelligible, a blow without reason, to be submitted to in a silence which, had it been broken, must have been resolved into bewildered protest. Apart from their present professions both Arthur and Hugh were moving towards the pursuit, that of authorship, which was soon to take at least equal rank with their other work. Within ten years it was as an essayist, a writer of delicate meditative prose that Arthur was most widely known, and to this he devoted the flower of his energy, while Hugh served his Church not as a parish priest, but as preacher and as writer of propagandist novels, novels with the purpose of showing the dealings of God through His Church. As works of art his sermons far transcended his books, an opinion which no one I think who ever listened to that tumultuous eloquence could doubt. They carried his untrammelled message; while he preached, he could say with supreme instinctive art all that in novel-writing he had more indirectly to convey: his sermons had an overwhelming sincerity which made the delivery of them flawless and flame-like. When he wrote he was never quite so inspired: the message was the same, but it had to be wrapt about with the allegory of ordinary life, he had to convey it in terms of country houses or historical episode, and the sermon which was the underlying intention was often a handicap to the art of story-telling. But it was towards his books that his inclination tended; his joy of achievement lay in the written, not in the spoken word.