The ideas of the Conventual house in which he had so lately spent hours of intense religious happiness closed upon him and possessed him. He was not to marry. He was reserved for the higher counsels, the Counsels of Perfection. The face and talk of his friend Brierly, who was so soon going to his dangerous and solitary post in Southern India, haunted his mind, and at last seemed to show him a way out of his darkness. His poor father and mother! But he never doubted for one moment that they would give him up, that they would let him follow his conscience. By the time the sun was fairly up, the storm of religious feeling had died down in Newbury. He had taken his resolve, but he was incapable of any further emotion concerning it. On the other hand, his heart was alive to the thought of Marcia, and of that letter she had sent him. Dear, generous Marcia! Once more he would write to her--once more! "DEAREST MARCIA,--I may call you so, I think, for the last time, and at this turning-point of both our lives. I may never see you again; or if we do meet, you will have become so strange to me that you will wonder in what other and distant life it was that we loved each other. I think you did love me for a little while, and I do bless and thank you that you let me know you--and love you. And I bless you above all for the thought of consolation and pity you had toward me, even yesterday, in those terrible hours--when you offered to come back to me and help me, as though our bond had never been broken. "No, dear Marcia!--I saw the truth in your face yesterday. I could not make you happy. I should set jarring a discord in your life for which it was never meant. You did right, absolutely right, to separate yourself from one whose inmost and irrevocable convictions repelled and shocked you. I may be narrow and cold; but I am not narrow enough--or cold enough!--to let you give yourself back to one you cannot truly love--or trust. But that you offered it, because you were sorry for me, and that you would have carried it out, firmly, your dear hand clenched, as it were, on the compact--that warms my heart--that I shall have, as a precious memory, to carry into the far-off life that I foresee. "I cannot write much about the terrible thing at Redcross Farm. Your great pity for me implies that you think me--and my father--in some way and in some degree, responsible. Perhaps we are--I do not wish to shirk the truth. If so, it is as soldiers under orders are responsible for the hurt and damage they may cause, in their King's war--as much, and as little. At least, so far as the main matter is concerned. That I might have been--that I ought to have been--infinitely more loving, wiser, stronger to help them--that I know--that I shall feel as long as I live. And it is a feeling which will determine all my future life.