He must be wanted elsewhere. Hamlin held definite opinions about a future life. He believed that death involved little change. He believed, further, that the conflict between good and evil went on upon the Other Side, that souls expanded or diminished over there just as here. Upon that belief he had built up his philosophy of life. It explained and justified apparent injustices and inequalities very perplexing to him as a young man. He believed, also, that good or evil inspired all human endeavour. The clay was informed by the spirit. Great writers, influencing millions, were merely the mouthpiece, the megaphone, of invisible spirits, guardian angels, to use the homely nursery expression, who whispered their message to the vessel appointed to receive it. Nobody, for many years, had heard him praise enthusiastically an individual. He praised the work that each had been inspired to do. In Nether-Applewhite, there happened to be a village idiot, whose great lolling head and vacuous eyes excited terror in children and often revulsion in adults. And the man was past middle age, helpless and gibbering from birth. Hamlin never passed him without reflecting that death would release an imprisoned soul destined, perhaps, to an undreamed-of development hereafter, the greater because it had been denied expression on earth. And, inversely, when he met, as he did occasionally, men pre-eminent in science, or art, or industry, he seemed to see clearly the man standing sharply apart from his work, often a very ordinary person, undistinguished save for the amazing fact that he had been selected, out of millions, to accomplish something vital to the progress of the world. He had found Authority for this personal belief in the New Testament. Hamlin sat still by his fire and thought of Mrs. Yellam. He desired to help her with an intensity which few would have suspected. Her empty pew, as before, stood out in his mind as a vacuum which he abhorred. Not because he was a parson. Churchgoing, in one sense, the sense in which William Saint regarded it, touched his humour. To go to church because it was respectable and pleased the Squire, to mumble prayers, to preserve a smug deportment, and rattle coins into an offertory plate, approximated closely to comic opera! Mrs. Yellam attended church to worship her Maker. Her abstention from Divine Service indicated loss of faith, the most grievous loss that can be imposed upon human beings. Faith filled Mrs. Yellam's pew; faithlessness emptied it. And if she, the strong woman, the helper in so many good works, stayed away from God's House, what would be the effect on the faith of others who looked up to her as a pattern and example? His fighting instincts were strongly stirred. But Uncle was right. For the moment, Susan Yellam stood alone, beyond man's help.