Gradually, as he drew nearer the hill’s summit, there formed in his mind the only real sanctuary of refuge, the only genuine deliverance. He must obey his innate conscience; and let the result be as God willed. At all costs he must shake himself clear of this hot, sweet, luscious bind-weed, that was choking the growth of his soul. His own soul--that, after all, was his first care, his predominant concern. To keep _that_, pure and undefiled, and let all else go! Confused by the subtle arguments of the serpent, he would cling only the more passionately to the actual figure of the God-Man, and obey his profound command in its literal simplicity. Ecclesiastical casuistry might say what it pleased about the danger he plunged Gladys into, in thus neglecting her. The matter had gone deeper than casuistry, deeper, far deeper, than points of doctrine. It had become a direct personal struggle between his own soul and Satan; a struggle in which, as he well knew, the only victory lay in flight. On other fields he might be commanded by his celestial Captain to hold his post to the last; but in the arena of this temptation, to hold the field was to desert the field; to escape from it, to win it. He paused breathlessly under a clump of larches, and stretching out his arms, seized--like Samson in the temple of Dagon--two of the slender-growing trunks. “Let all this insidious growth of Nature,” he thought, “all this teeming and prolific exuberance of godless life, be thrust into oblivion, as long as the great translunar Secret be kept inviolable!” Exhausted by the struggle within him he sank down in the green twilight of that leafy security, and crossed his hands over his knees. Through a gap in the foliage he could perceive the valley below; he could even perceive the outline of the roof of Nevilton House. But against the magic of those carved pinnacles he had found a counter-charm. In the hushed stillness about him, he seemed conscious of the power of all these entangled growing things as a sinister heathen influence pulling him earthward. Men differ curiously from one another in this respect. To some among them the influences of what we call Nature are in harmony with all that is good in them, and have a soothing and mystical effect. Others seem to disentangle themselves from every natural surrounding, and to stand out, against the background of their own spiritual horizons, clear-edged, opaque, and resistant.