The time passed very pleasantly at Caistorholm Vicarage. Edward rose betimes each morning, and was often deep immersed in the intricacies of the Skerne Iron Works Company’s accounts long before his host had quitted his downy bed, and could with clear conscience enter into those delights of country-life that were to him all the sweeter because unaccustomed. The glories of the Vicarage garden were on the wane, but its orchard was prepared to yield its juicy fruits. The fields were fast ripening for the sickle. The great calm and hush of those pastoral scenes stole over his senses like a young child’s sleep. There were no revelries, but there was constant interest. The Archdeacon had suggested a dinner-party, but Edward had been so emphatic in his declarations of preference for quiet, the project had been abandoned. A neighbouring vicar or rector dropped in occasionally for luncheon, and was easily persuaded to stay for dinner. Edward had, at first, spoken rarely and with reserve about matters social and political—doctrine was avoided by common consent. Strange, one may pass a month in a clergyman’s house and never hear religion discussed. Presumably the household has so long taken fundamental dogma for granted that the possibilities of wide divergence amounting to repudiation is not so much as thought of. Edward saw with amaze men of unquestioned scholarship and intelligence equally indisputably above the average grow warm and excited in discussing the Eastward position, incense, lights, stoles, birettas, man millinery generally. He itched to tell them that the vast bulk of those who should be their flock didn’t care a brass farthing about genuflexions or ecclesiastical trappings. What the human soul yearns to understand is the Divine rule and ordinance, if rule and ordnance there be and not blind chaos; to know if man be indeed _Imaginis Imago_, or but the last if not the final link of a chain long drawn out with a protoplasm at one end of it; if there is indeed and in very sooth a God our Father, who sees and loves and can be moved by prayer, if man have in truth an immortal spirit or is like unto the beasts that perish; if it be true that after death comes the judgement, when the gross inequalities of this world shall be made right and virtue shall indeed reign. Edward knew, as any man with ears to hear may know, that the avowed scepticism of mankind is a mere speck of dust compared with the huge mass of practical perhaps unconscious, infidelity that pervades society. It filled him with impatient scorn that men who should be leaders of thought, able to give counsel and enlightenment to those who grope in darkness, should spend the priceless years in mumbling twaddling homilies and in agitated harassment about stage effects. He could not interest himself in the question how far a beneficed incumbent may go on the road to Rome without jeopardising his living. He longed to tell these clerical traitors who let “I dare not wait upon I would,” that