Eyes were moist, and hearts throbbed unusually among the simple-minded village folk as they filed out, but little was said; they felt they had been assisting at one of the solemn mysteries of the church, and no dubious composition, no grandiloquence of the vicar's came between them and the heart-cry of the old man. Edward John broke the silence in which his little group walked homeward by saying: "There's a deal of truth in what the vicar said about _vanitas vanitatium_, 'Enry. Seems to me there ain't nothing much worth having in this world unless we're keepin' in mind the world that is to come." "That is so, father," Henry assented shortly; for his mind was full of new and comforting thoughts, and his heart suffused with a tenderness he could not speak. A great love for his father had been budding steadily when he fancied most it was withering, and it had burst almost at once into full bloom. To Mr. Needham also his point of view was suddenly and for ever changed. Both his father and the vicar had been objects of his youthful admiration; but when there came the illuminating knowledge of the world and the intimate contact with life which journalism brings to its young professors--as they in their fond hearts fancy--both figures began to recede into the background, in common with others that had once been cherished; for, unwillingly it may have been, but still actually, the cynic which is in us all was raised up in Henry by the touch of a master cynic. Frankly, he had been dangerously near the condition of a "superior person"--of all human states the most contemptible. His father's ignorant ways, the vicar's little affectations of learning, his mother's curl-papers, his sisters' dowdiness of dress--these were the things that caused them to recede to the background of the young man's mind when the young man was in the first lust of his life-experience. And all the time he was uneasily conscious that he himself was at fault, and they wholesomer bits of God's handiwork than he. But the tragic ending of the disturber of his mind, the almost certainty of the cause, was a crushing commentary on all the philosophy which Adrian Grant had preached. Art for the sake of art, and a dose of poison when you take the fancy to be rid of your responsibilities. That was how Henry's experience of the novelist summed itself up in his mind after Mr. Needham's artless little human sermon. The vicar might be a hide-bound thinker, a mere echo of ages of hide-bound Bible interpreters, but he was a better and a bigger man than he who went out with his 'cello between his knees, thought Henry. Oh, all this prattle of those who were devoted to the arts! How futile it sounded when, as with a new revelation, the young man saw and loved at sight the good, rude health of his father and his sisters, living as bits of Nature, and standing not up to rail at Fate, but without whimpering playing their tiny parts in the drama of life.