He would come by stealth to pay Valentia visits, preferring the evening hours when in the summer she used to sit with her work, on a terrace overlooking a sloping orchard, and watch Vennie water her roses. The vicarage terrace was a place of extraordinary quiet and peace, eminently adapted to the low-voiced, nervous ramblings of a recluse of Maurice Quincunx’s timidity. The old lady by degrees quite won this eccentric’s heart; and the queerly assorted friends would pace up and down for hours in the cool of the evening talking of things in no way connected either with Mr. Romer or the Church--the two subjects about which Mr. Quincunx held dangerously strong views. Apart from this quaint outcast and the youthful parson, Mrs. Seldom’s only other intimate in the place was a certain John Francis Taxater, a gentleman of independent means, living by himself with an old housekeeper in a cottage called The Gables, situated about half-way between the vicarage and the village. Mr. Taxater was a Catholic and also a philosopher; these two peculiarities affording the solution to what otherwise would have been an insoluble psychic riddle. Even as it was, Mr. Taxater’s mind was of so subtle and complicated an order, that he was at once the attraction and the despair of all the religious thinkers of that epoch. For it must be understood that though quietly resident under the shadow of Nevilton Mount, the least essay from Mr. Taxater’s pen was eagerly perused by persons interested in religious controversy in all the countries of Europe. He wrote for philosophical journals in London, Paris, Rome and New York; and there often appeared at The Gables most surprising visitors from Germany and Italy and Spain. He had a powerful following among the more subtle-minded of the Catholics of England; and was highly respected by important personages in the social, as well as the literary circles, of Catholic society. The profundity of his mind may be gauged from the fact that he was able to steer his way successfully through the perilous reefs of “modernistic” discussion, without either committing himself to heretical doctrine or being accused of reactionary ultramontanism. Mr. Taxater’s written works were, however, but a trifling portion of his personality. His intellectual interests were as rich and varied as those of some great humanist of the Italian Renaissance, and his personal habits were as involved and original as his thoughts were complicated and deep. He was perpetually engaged in converting the philosopher in him to Catholicism, and the Catholic in him to philosophy--yet he never permitted either of these obsessions to interfere with his enjoyment of life.