During their brief conversation the vicar had been conscious of many emotions. He blamed himself for his narrowness and the somewhat fantastic lengths to which his recent talk with Gortre had gone. The man was an infidel, no doubt. His intellectual attacks upon Christian faith were terribly damaging and subversive. Still, his love for his fellow-men was sincere, it seemed. He attacked the faith, but not the preachers of it. And--a half thought crossed his brain--he might have been sent to him for some good purpose. St. Paul had not always borne the name of Paul! These thoughts, but half formulated in his brain, had their immediate effect in concrete action. "Won't you take off your coat, Mr. Schuabe," he said, "and smoke a cigar with me in my study?" The other hesitated a moment, looked doubtful, and then assented. He hung his coat up in the hall and went into the other room with the vicar. During the conversation in the drawing-room Helena had come back from the concert, and Basil, hearing her, had left the study and gone to her own private sanctum for a last few minutes before saying good-night. Helena sat in a low chair by the fire sipping a bowl of soup which the maid had brought up to her. She was a little tired by the concert, where a local pianist had been playing a nocturne of Chopin's as if he wanted to make it into soup, and the quiet of her own sitting-room, the intimate comfort of it all, and the sense of happiness that Basil's presence opposite gave her were in delightful contrast. "It was very stupid, dear," she said. "Mrs. Pryde was rather trying, full of dull gossip about every one, and the music wasn't good. Mr. Cuthbert played as if he was playing the organ in church. His touch is utterly unfitted for anything except the War March from _Athalie_ with the stops out. He knows nothing of the piano. I was in a front seat, and I could see his knee feeling for the swell all the time. He played _the_ sonata as if he was throwing the moonlight at one in great solid chunks. I'm glad to be back. How nice it is to sit here with you, dearest!--and how good this Bovril is!" she concluded with a little laugh of content and happiness at this moment of acute physical and mental ease. He looked lovingly at her as she lay back in rest and the firelight played over her white arms and pale gold hair. "It's wonderful to think," he said, with a little catch in his voice, "it's wonderful to me, an ever-recurring wonder, to think that some day you and I will always be together for all our life, here and afterwards. What supreme, unutterable happiness God gives to His children! Do you know, dear, sometimes as I read prayers or stand by the altar, I am filled with a sort of rapture of thankfulness which is voiceless in its intensity. Tennyson got nearer to expressing it than any one in that beautiful _St. Agnes' Eve_ of his--a little gem which, with its simplicity and fervour, is worth far more than Keats's poem with all its literary art."