Then he woke, with the roar and thump still in his ears, for his head hung down over the straw below the level of his body. All his limbs were cramped, and he found it difficult to rise. The first despair of waking was upon him, and he wished he could have died in his dream. Bright sunshine was streaming into the barn, lighting up its dark old corners where the cobwebs hung like lace. Framed in the big doorway was a green hill freckled with primroses and cuckoo flowers, with broom bushes budding against a thick blue sky that seemed to drip with sunshine. He stumbled out into the stroke of the wind, now scarcely enough to ripple the big rain puddles that lay blue and glimmering in the road. He was in a part of the country he did not know, doubtless beyond the frontiers of the Four Roads, in some by-lane behind Rushlake Green. Though it was too late, he felt that even now he could not go back to Sunday Street. He shrank from meeting human beings, especially those who had sat before him in rows like pea-pods last night. Oh, those heads! he would never forget them, how they had stared and rolled.... He turned away from the road, and went up the rising ground behind the barn. It was a spread of wild land, some common now in its spring bloom of gorse and violets. He threw himself down upon the turf, and for a few minutes lay motionless, with the sun gently steaming his damp crumpled clothes. He longed to be back in his dream, back in the red glow of the furnace, back at the old cross-roads in Kent. A sense of great cruelty and injustice was upon him. Why had the Lord called him from the work he loved, away to unknown cares and sorrows, to a life for which he was not fitted? It even seemed to him that if only he had been left a blacksmith this tragedy of Jerry would not have happened ... if Jerry had never been in the impossible, grotesque situation of “a clergyman’s son.”... Why had the Lord sent voices, which never came now, which, indeed, had not come since his marriage? Why had the Lord raised up the minister at Tenterden, to send him to a training college and try to make him what he never could be, a gentleman? He was no minister—only a poor image of one, which everybody laughed at. He had had qualms of doubts before this, but he had put them from him; now he was too exhausted, too badly bruised and beaten, to deceive himself any further. He was no minister of God—he could hardly, after a twelve years’ pastorate, scrape together a congregation; people went anywhere but to the Particular Baptists. They never asked for his ministrations at sick-beds, they hardly ever came to him to be married or buried, as if they doubted the efficacy of these rites at his hands; he had not performed one baptism in the last five years, and the only time his church has been full was when they had all come to gaze on him, to see how he bore his trouble. On the other hand, if a man had a sick sheep or an ailing cow, or if his