impulse as had seized himself yesterday afternoon, and resentiment about his weakness had spoilt his whole life.  And those dreams!  How significant now were the words of the Compline hymn, and how much it behoved a Christian soul to vanquish these ill dreams against beholding which the defence of the Creator was invoked.  He had vowed celibacy; yet already, three months after his twenty-first birthday, after never once being troubled with the slightest hint that the vow he had taken might be hard to keep, his security had been threatened.  How right the Rector had been about that frightening beatitude.

Mark had taken the direction of Wychford, and when he reached the bridge at the bottom of the road from Wych-on-the-Wold he thought he would turn aside and visit the Greys whom he had not seen for a long time.  He was conscious of a curiosity to know if the feelings aroused by Esther could be aroused by Monica or Margaret or Pauline.  He found the dear family unchanged and himself, so far as they were concerned, equally unchanged and as much at his ease as he had ever been.

“And what are you going to do now?” one of them asked.

“You mean immediately?”

Mark could not bring himself to say that he did not know, because such a reply would have seemed to link him with the state of mind in which he had been thrown yesterday afternoon.

“Well, really, I was thinking of going into a monastery,” he announced.

Pauline clapped her hands.

“Now I think that is just what you ought to do,” she said.

Then followed questions about which Order he proposed to join; and Mark ashamed to go back on what he had said lest they should think him flippant answered that he thought of joining the Order of St. George.

“You know—­Father Burrowes, who works among soldiers.”

When Mark was standing by the cross-roads above Wychford and was wondering which to take, he decided that really the best thing he could do at this moment was to try to enter the Order of St. George.  He might succeed in being ordained without going to a theological college, or if the Bishop insisted upon a theological course and he found that he had a vocation for the religious life, he could go to Glastonbury and rejoin the Order when he was a priest.  It was true that Father Rowley disapproved of Father Burrowes; but he had never expressed more than a general disapproval, and Mark was inclined to attribute his attitude to the prejudice of a man of strong personality and definite methods against another man of strong personality and definite methods working on similar lines among similar people.  Mark remembered now that there had been a question at one time of Father Burrowes’ opening a priory in the next parish to St. Agnes’.  Probably that was the reason why Father Rowley disapproved of him.  Mark had heard the monk preach on one occasion and had liked him.  Outside the pulpit, however, he knew nothing more of him than what he