“I thought perhaps you’d like to stay at your monastery again,” said Mrs. Fane. “I was thinking of going abroad.” Michael’s face fell, and his mother was solicitously penitent. “My dearest boy, I never dreamed you would want to be with me. You’ve always gone out on Sundays.” “I know, I’m sorry, I won’t again,” Michael assured her. “And I’ve made my arrangements now. I wish I’d known. But why shouldn’t you go and see Stella? It seems a pity that you and she should grow up so much apart.” “Well, I will, if you like,” said Michael. “Dearest boy, what has happened to you? You are so agreeable,” exclaimed Mrs. Fane. In the end it was arranged that Michael should accompany Mr. Viner on his holiday in France, and afterwards stay with Stella with a family at Compiègne for the rest of the time. Michael went to see his mother off at Charing Cross before he joined Mr. Viner. “Darling Michael,” she murmured as the train began to move slowly forward. “You’re looking so well and happy—just like you were two years ago. Just like——” The rest of the comparison was lost in the noise of the speeding train. Chapter X: _Stella_ M ICHAEL spent a charming fortnight with Father Viner in Amiens, Chartres and Rouen. The early Masses to which they went along the cool, empty streets of the morning, and the shadowy, candle-lit Benedictions from which they came home through the deepening dusk gave to Michael at least a profound hope, if not the astonishing faith of his first religious experience. Sitting with the priest at the open window of their inn, while down below the footsteps of the wayfarers were pattering like leaves, Michael recaptured some of that emotion of universal love which with sacramental force had filled his heart during the wonder of transition from boyhood to adolescence. He did not wish to know more about these people than could be told by the sound of their progress so light, so casual, so essentially becoming to the sapphirine small world in which they hurried to and fro. The passion of hope overwhelmed Michael’s imagination with a beauty that was perfectly expressed by the unseen busy populations of a city’s waning twilight. Love, birth, death, greed, ambition, all humanity’s stress of thought and effort, were merged in a murmurous contentment of footfalls and faint-heard voices. Michael supposed that somehow to God the universe must sound much as this tall street of Rouen sounded now to him at his inn window, and he realized for the first time how God must love the world. Later, the twilight and voices and footfalls would fade together into night, and through long star-scattered silences Michael would brood with a rapture that became more than hope, if less than faith with