Yet the marvel of it seemed to him to lie in this: that the priest himself lived actually a life of loving devotion and sacrifice in marked opposition to this doctrine of formal cruelty; that his church, more successfully than any other in Christendom, had met the needs of humanity, coming closer to men in their sin and sickness, ministering to them with a deeper knowledge, a more affectionate intimacy, than any other. That all these men of God should hold formally to dogmas belying the humaneness of their actual practise--here was the puzzling anomaly that might well give pause to any casual message-bringer. Struggle as he might, it was like a tangling mesh cast over him--this growing sense of his own futility. Along with this conviction of his powerlessness there came to him a new sense of reliance upon Nancy. Unconsciously at first he turned to her for sunlight, big views and quiet power, for the very stimulus he had been wont to draw from the wide, high reaches of his far-off valley. Later, came a conscious turning, an open-eyed bringing of all his needs, to lay them in her waiting lap. Then it was he saw that on that first night at Edom her confidence and enthusiasm had been things he leaned upon quite naturally, though unwittingly. The knowledge brought him a vague unrest. Furtive, elusive impulses, borne to him on the wings of certain old memories--memories once resolutely put away in the face of his one, big world-desire--now came to trouble him. It seemed that one must forever go in circles. With fine courage he had made straight off to toil up the high difficult paths of the ideal. Never had he consciously turned, nor even swerved. Yet here he was at length upon his old tracks, come again to the wondering girl. Did it mean, then, that his soul was baffled--or did it mean that his soul would not suffer him to baffle it, try as he might? Was that girl of the old days to greet him with her wondering eyes at the end of every high path? These and many other questions he asked himself. At the close of this day he sought her, eager for the light of her understanding eyes--for a certain waiting sympathy she never withheld. As she looked up now with a kind of composed gladness, it seemed to him that they two alone, out of all the world, were sanely quiet. Silently he sank into a chair near her and they sat long thus, feeling no need of words. At last she spoke. "Are you coming nearer to it, Bernal?" He laughed.