Only by the help of that Power behind the veil of things, perceived by the mind of faith! "_Thou, Thou art being and breath_!--Thine is this truth, which, like a living hand, bridles and commands me. Grind my life as corn in Thy mill!--but forsake me not! Nay, Thou wilt not, Thou canst not forsake me!" No hope for a man attempting such an enterprise as Meynell's but in this simplicity, this passion of self-surrender. Without it no adventure in the spiritual fight has ever touched and fired the heart of man. Meynell was sternly and simply aware of it. But how is this temper, this passion, kindled? The answer flashed. Everywhere the divine ultimate Power mediates itself through the earthly elements and forces, speaks through small, childish things, incarnates itself in lover, wife, or friend--flashing its mystic fire through the web of human relations. It seemed to Meynell, as he stood in the evening stillness by the pond, hidden from sight by the light brushwood round him, that, absorbed as he had been from his youth in the symbolism and passion of the religious life, as other men are absorbed in art or science, he had never really understood one of these great words by which he imagined himself to live--Love, or Endurance, or Sacrifice, or Joy--because he had never known the most sacred, the most intimate, things of human life out of which they grow. And there uprose in him a sudden yearning--a sudden flame of desire--for the revealing love of wife and child. As it thrilled through him, he seemed to be looking down into the eyes--so frank, so human--of Mary Elsmere. Then while he watched, lost in feeling, yet instinctively listening for any movement in the wood, there was a flicker of white among the trees opposite. A girl, book in hand, came down to the water's edge, and paused there a little, watching the glow of sunset on the water. Meynell retreated farther into the wood; but he was still able to see her. Presently she sat down, propping herself against a tree, and began to read. Her presence, the grace of her bending neck, informed the silence of the woods with life and charm. Meynell watched her a few moments in a trance of pleasure. But memory broke in upon the trance and scattered all his pleasure. What reasonable hope of winning the daughter of that quiet, indomitable woman, who, at their first meeting, had shown him with such icy gentleness the gulf between himself and them? And yet between himself and Mary he knew that there was no gulf. Spiritually she was her father's child, and not her mother's. But to suppose that she would consent to bring back into her mother's life the same tragic conflict, in new form, which had already rent and seared it, was madness. He read his dismissal in her quiet avoidance of him ever since she had been a witness of her mother's manner toward him.