The witchery of Thurloe End had been meaningless to her. Claxted was still to her dear and simple. She saw nothing whatever to alter in her own home or in his. Barns, and shrines, and carven shields, merely bewildered her. He had felt, as he talked, that so far as externals went, she would have preferred the incandescent lights in rows, the red drugget and the pitch-pine of the Mission Hall. Perfectly simply, then, she had said: "Paul, dear, if Jesus calls you, you must do what He says." Parrot-like, he had answered her with the old cry: "But I don't know!" He could feel now her fingers on his arm, clutching a little more tightly. "Don't, Paul," she had said. "It seems to me quite plain. Jesus doesn't hide Himself. He speaks plainly enough in our hearts, and you--you 'know His voice.'" He had stared hard at her in the light of a street lamp as they passed: the firm little face rather sedate; the precise, neat dress; her gloved hand; the little hymn and prayer book she carried which he had given her, surreptitiously. Intuitively he saw that she belonged to Claxted; yes, though he knew that he had modified her views not a little, Claxted was bone of her bone and flesh of her flesh. Life was amazingly simple to her. She might question the form in which the things of religion reached her--the authority of Christ, His presence in the Sacrament; she might become High Church in practice; but nothing in Claxted rubbed her up the wrong way. And he saw suddenly just what it meant that her home was in Edward Street and her father a photographer. She was unobtrusive, trim, conventional. He had wanted to seize her almost roughly, shake her, drag her out, and he had not been able to do it at all because she would not have understood the first syllable of explanation. Come to that, did he? Perhaps, that very day, he had come to see more plainly the point. The scarlet jersey--well, it was just a scarlet jersey to Edith Thornton. You put it on, if Christ said so. Why not? Lying there then, in the flush of success, blue shining sky above, clear shining river hard by, her words in his pocket, no, in his heart, Paul nevertheless saw a shadow athwart the sky. He had known long that an impermeable curtain was slowly dropping between him and his people; he had known that their very voices sounded odd--familiar, arrestingly familiar, but as those who speak another tongue; and he had known that the change lay in him and not in them. There were notes in the past that no longer struck response, that reached him muffled, through the curtain. And he saw plainly enough that Edith belonged to that side.