He thought of the feelings with which he had taken Orders, of Oxford scenes and Oxford persons, of the efforts, the pains, the successes of his first year at Murewell. What a ghastly mistake it had all been! He felt a kind of sore contempt for himself, for his own lack of prescience, of self-knowledge. His life looked to him so shallow and worthless. How does a man ever retrieve such a false step? He groaned aloud as he thought of Catherine linked to one born to defeat her hopes, and all that natural pride that a woman feels in the strength and consistency of the man she loves. As he sat there by the water he touched the depths of self-humiliation. As to religious belief, everything was a chaos. What might be to him the ultimate forms and condition of thought, the tired mind was quite incapable of divining. To every stage in the process of destruction it was feverishly alive. But its formative energy was for the moment gone. The foundations were swept away, and everything must be built up afresh. Only the _habit_ of faith held the close instinctive clinging to a Power beyond sense--a Goodness, a Will, not man’s. The soul had been stripped of its old defences, but at his worst there was never a moment when Elsmere felt himself _utterly_ forsaken. But his people--his work! Every now and then into the fragmentary debate still going on within him, there would flash little pictures of Murewell. The green, with the sun on the house-fronts, the awning over the village shop, the vane on the old ‘Manor-house,’ the familiar figures at the doors; his church, with every figure in the Sunday congregation as clear to him as though he were that moment in the pulpit; the children he had taught, the sick he had nursed, this or that weather-beaten or brutalized peasant whose history he knew, whose tragic secrets he had learnt--all these memories and images clung about him as though with ghostly hands, asking--‘Why will you desert us? You are ours--stay with us!’ Then his thoughts would run over the future, dwelling, with a tense, realistic sharpness, on every detail which lay before him---the arrangements with his _locum tenens_, the interview with the Bishop, the parting with the rectory. It even occurred to him to wonder what must be done with Martha and his mother’s cottage. His mother? As he thought of her a wave of unutterable longing rose and broke. The difficult tears stood in his eyes. He had a strange conviction that at this crisis of his life, she of all human beings would have understood him best.