It may be said that it was this very sense of contact, continued through long years of labour and success, that was the original foundation of the Archdeacon's pride. If of late years that pride had grown from the seeds of the Archdeacon's own self-confidence and appreciation, who can blame him? We translate more easily than we know our gratitude to God into our admiration of ourselves. Over and over again in the past, when he had been labouring with especial fervour, he was aware that, in the simplest sense of the word, God was "walking with him." He was conscious of a new light and heat, of a fresh companionship; he could almost translate into physical form that comradeship of which he was so tenderly aware. How could it be but that after such an hour he should look down from those glorious heights upon his other less favoured fellow-companions? No merit of his own that he had been chosen, but the choice had been made. On this evening he was in sad need of comfort. Never in all his past years had life gone so hardly with him as it was going now. It was as though, about three or four months back, he had, without knowing it, stepped into some new and terrible country. One feature after another had changed, old familiar faces wore new unfamiliar disguises, every step that he took now seemed to be dangerous, misfortune after misfortune had come to him, at first slight and even ludicrous, at last with Falk's escape, serious and bewildering. Bewildering! That was the true word to describe his case! He was like a man moving through familiar country and overtaken suddenly by a dense fog. Through it all, examine it as minutely as he might, he could not see that he had committed the slightest fault. He had been as he had always been, and yet the very face of the town was changed to him, his son had left him, even his wife, to whom he had been married for twenty years, was altered. Was it not natural, therefore, that he should attribute all of this to the only new element that had been introduced into his life during these last months, to the one human being alive who was his declared enemy, to the one man who had openly, in the public road, before witnesses, insulted him, to the man who, from the first moment of his coming to Polchester, had laughed at him and mocked and derided him? To Ronder! To Ronder! The name was never out of his brain now, lying there, stirring, twisting in his very sleep, sneering, laughing even in the heart of his private prayers. He was truly in need of God that evening, and there, at the top of the High Street, he saw Him framed in all the colour and glow and sparkling sunlight of the summer evening, filling him with warmth and new courage, surrounding him, enveloping him in love and tenderness.