On the Dean's right hand sat Canon Dornal, a man barely forty, who owed his canonry to the herculean work he had done for fourteen years in a South London parish, work that he would never have relinquished for the comparative ease of the Markborough precincts but for a sudden failure in health which had pulled him up in mid-career, and obliged him to think of his wife and children. He had insisted, however, on combining with his canonry a small living in the town, where he could still slave as he pleased; and his sermons in the Cathedral were generally held to be, next to the personality of the Bishop, all that was noblest in Markborough Christianity. His fine head, still instinct with the energy of youth, was covered with strong black hair; dark brows shadowed Cornish blue eyes, simple, tranquil, almost _naif_, until of a sudden there rushed into them the passionate or tender feeling that was in truth the heart of the man. The mouth and chin were rather prominent, and, when at rest, severe. He was a man in whom conscience was a gadfly, remorseless and tormenting. He was himself overstrained and his influence sometimes produced in others a tension on which they looked back with resentment. But he was a saint; open, pure, and loving as a child; yet often tempest-driven with new ideas, since he possessed at once the imagination that frees a man from tradition, and the piety which clings to it. Beside him sat a University professor, the young holder of an important chair, who had the face, the smile, the curly hair of a boy of twenty, or appeared to have them, till you came to notice the subtleties of the mouth and the crow's-feet which had gathered round the eyes. And the paradox of his aspect only repeated the paradox within. His "History and the Gospels," recently published, would have earned him excommunication under any Pope; yet no one was a more rigid advocate of tests and creeds, or could be more eloquent in defence of damnatory clauses. The clergy who admired and applauded him did not read his books. It was rumoured indeed that there were many things in them which were unsound; but the rumour only gave additional zest to the speeches in which at Church Congresses and elsewhere he flattered clerical prejudice, and encouraged clerical ignorance. To him there was no more "amusing" study--using "amusing" in the French sense as meaning something that keeps a man intellectually happy and awake--than the study of the Gospels. They presented an endless series of riddles, and riddles were what he liked. But the scientific treatment of these riddles had, according to him, nothing to do with the discipline of the Church; and to the discipline of the Church this young man, with the old eyes and mouth, was rigorously attached. He was a bachelor and a man of means--facts which taken together with his literary reputation and his agreeable aspect made him welcome among women; of which he was well aware.