On thundered the train, and yet another vision rose before Ralph. He was in Westminster Abbey and there before him he suddenly saw a face which took his heart by storm--the face of his old playfellow grown into gentle gracious womanhood. Then the same face, but with wistful love-lit eyes was lifted up to his outside the house in Queen Anne’s Gate kindling hope in his heart and filling him with a glow of happiness which had carried him through the pain of the parting. These same love-lit eyes and a yet more wonderful response of soul to soul rose in vision before him as he recalled a certain summer afternoon by the sea shore. What did it matter to him that the cold spring wind raged round the carriage piercing every crevice, or that the hail-stones rattled angrily against the glass! He was far away from it all, seeing blue waves and the mellow brown side of a boat and Evereld’s blushing face. The memory of that August day lasted him all the rest of the way to London; then in the chilly dawn they made their way to the nearest hotel, where the order of things was reversed for Ralph at last fell sound asleep on a sofa in the reading room and it was Macneillie who was wakeful and saw visions of the past--visions that he dared not dwell upon because with them there came the maddening recollection that he was close to Christine, that it would be the easiest thing in the world, yet the most fatal, to go that afternoon and call upon her. What was she doing? How did she struggle on in the difficult life on which she had embarked? All the craving to know, all the longing to serve her must be crushed down in his heart. Alone she must dree her weird. Alone he must bear the anguish of her pain and his own bitter loss. Almost involuntarily, those hard views of God from which years ago he had been rescued by Thomas Erskine’s book “The Spiritual Order,” returned now to him, flooding his mind with rebellious thoughts. Why did all this misery come to him? Why were the mistakes and sins of others visited upon him? Why were the ways of God so unequal? Other men prospered. Other men had the desire of their hearts granted. Why was he for ever to be thwarted? For years he knew that he had made strenuous efforts to live uprightly, yet there seemed nothing before him but sorrow; while over yonder there was a mere boy of one and twenty about to gain after the briefest of struggles the woman he loved. The Tempter had however defeated his own object by introducing the thought of Ralph Denmead. Macneillie’s heart was too large for jealousy to harbour in it. Jealousy can only rest long and comfortably in narrow, and cramped hearts where self love and petty absorption in trifles has contracted the space.