Paul deposited his suitcase in the dog-cart and climbed on to the seat alongside the driver. He was in the heart of the Midlands, and the lamps on the little country station were already being dimmed to save the Company's oil, since the next and last train of the day was not due for several hours. Outside the station enclosure, lights behind the red blinds of an inn threw a glow on the hard road, and from a cottage window or two came here and there a flicker; but these passed, they were speedily out into the open country. Trees loomed up against frosty stars; but for the most part high hedges hid even the fields on either side the narrow lane. A small moon, low on the horizon, swung up and down over them like a child's toy. The beast between the shafts kept up a steady trot, though now and again the steam of his exertion rose mistily in the radiance of the poor lamps of the dog-cart as he ploughed uphill at a walk. By his side, Paul's driver soon relapsed into the monotonous silence of the country. Paul himself, muffled up on his high seat, swaying a little with the motion, had time to think. He was actually on his way to stay with Father Vassall, and he was aware that he was in doubt as to the issue of his journey. The last Christmas vacation and the ensuing Lent term had goaded him to the act. Christmas had been almost impossible at home, and the Lent term had shown him, every day more clearly, that he could not profess evangelical Anglicanism as a minister and a missionary. Claxted had stung him into that conclusion on every side. The atmosphere of the Mission Hall, sincere, earnest, zealous as it was, left him gasping now as a fish out of water. He had stood on its platform and not known what to say. The illogical inconclusiveness of the old attitude stared at him so starkly that he could no longer repeat the old shibboleths. The sermon in which one expounded a text as if the phrases of it and the entire context had dropped, verbally complete, like the image of the great goddess Diana, from the skies, and then exhorted, in words made as vivid and as practical as possible, to the vague sensationalism of "Come to Jesus" or "Accept Salvation," was now beyond him. The thing, left thus in the air, had become meaningless to him, and his very sincerity forbad his preaching anything in which he did not wholeheartedly believe. The Church and Sacraments, the old truths set in a practical system, these seemed necessary to the Gospel salvation. Yet a more thoughtful worker or two had already been offended by the vague and tentative phrasing in which he tried to hint at it.