The poor young man accordingly marched along George Street deeply disconsolate. When he met the perpetual curate of St. Roque's at the door of Masters's bookshop--where, to be sure, at that hour in the morning, it was natural to encounter Mr. Wentworth--the young Nonconformist gazed at him with a certain wistfulness. They looked at each other, in fact, being much of an age, and not unsimilar in worldly means just at the present moment. There were various points of resemblance between them. Mr. Vincent, too, wore an Anglican coat, and assumed a high clerical aspect--sumptuary laws forbidding such presumption being clearly impracticable in England; and the Dissenter was as fully endowed with natural good looks as the young priest. How was it, then, that so vast a world of difference and separation lay between them? For one compensating moment Mr. Vincent decided that it was because of his more enlightened faith, and felt himself persecuted. But even that pretence did not serve the purpose. He began to divine faintly, and with a certain soreness, that external circumstances do stand for something, if not in the great realities of a man's career, at least in the comforts of his life. A poor widow's son, educated at Homerton, and an English squire's son, public school and university bred, cannot begin on the same level. To compensate that disadvantage requires something more than a talent for preaching. Perhaps genius would scarcely do it without the aid of time and labour. The conviction fell sadly upon poor Arthur Vincent as he went down the principal street of Carlingford in the October sunshine. He was rapidly becoming disenchanted, and neither the 'Nonconformist' nor the 'Patriot,' nor Exeter Hall itself, could set him up again.