For the time his disappointments about Martin were forgotten. There, it is true, his dreams about his boy’s future had been dispelled by a rude and bitter awakening, but here, at any rate, was something which he had never dreamed being realised, and without overestimating the force and value of education and the influences which spring from environment and mode of life, he believed that Helen would assuredly live her mature and wider life on the lines in which she had been brought up. So in this marriage he saw a strong weapon forged of steel and wielded by a loyal hand in defence of his mistress the Church. He knew well the immense power which in England a territorial magnate is possessed of; how by the mere fact of his wealth and position he can control the course of wide issues. Hitherto Frank had done just that; he had always ranged himself on the side of education and religion, or rather he had ranged the inert weight of all he represented there, while he himself had keenly pursued the artistic things of life. But now Helen, with all the influence of her home and upbringing strong within her, would come to add life to this solid weight, making it an active and potent instead of a passive instrument of good. He almost envied the girl,--such opportunity was given to few only, and on her would the responsibility and the glory rest. His district-visiting that afternoon had taken him into the farthest limits of his parish, and a three-mile walk into the glories of the sunset lay before him when he turned homewards. A flush of colour, vivid and delicate as the cheek of youth, incarnadined the west, over which a few light fleeces of crimson cloud hung like flames, and further up from the horizon a belt of aqueous green melted into the transparent blue of the sky overhead. The sun had already sunk behind the tawny line of swelling down, and the water-meadows by the Itchen, where his path lay, were full of dusky and deepening shadows. Right down the centre ran the lucent stream, reflecting on its surface the blue and the green and the flush of the sunset sky. Rooks cawed their way homeward to where the elms of Chartries showed black against the luminous west, and to the left of the long gabled façade of house-roof rose the grey gothic tower of his church, the lodestar of his life, the mistress of his heart. That was the realest thing in all the world to him; all that was beautiful at this magic hour in earth and sky was but a path that conducted his soul thither; all that he loved on earth was only the shadow and faint similitude of the great love of his which centred there. Nothing had any real existence except in its relation to that; everything else was but an avenue to an anti-chamber in the house of many mansions. And as his eye first caught sight of the grey, cross-surmounted tower, he stopped a moment, uncovered his head, and with closed eyes stood still in a Presence more poignantly there with him than any. Through his impatience