Had it not been for the talks he had heard of late, in Dr. Langton’s house, he might have passed through his divinity studies at Oxford as his brother had done before him, content to drift with the stream, ignorant of the undercurrents which were already disturbing its apparently tranquil surface, and ready in due course to be consecrated to his office, and to take some benefice if he could get it, and live and die as the average priest of those times did, without troubling himself over the vexed questions of papal encroachment and traffic in pardons and indulgences which were setting Germany in a flame.

But he had been first aroused by seeing the light in Freda’s eyes as these questions had been discussed in the hearing of her and her sister.  From the first moment of his presentation to Dr. Langton’s family Dalaber had been strongly attracted by the beautiful sisters, and especially by Freda, whose quick, responsive eagerness and keen insight and discrimination made a deep impression upon him.  The soundness of her learning amazed him at the outset; for her father would turn to her to verify some reference from his costly manuscripts or learned tomes, and he soon saw that Latin and Greek were to her as her mother tongue.

When she did join in the conversation respecting the interpretation or translation of the Holy Scriptures, he had quickly noted that her scholarship was far deeper than his own.  He had been moved to a vivid admiration at first, and then to something that was more than admiration.  And the birth and growth of his spiritual life he traced directly to those impulses which had been aroused within him as he had heard Freda Langton speak and argue and ask questions.

That was how it had started; but it was Clarke’s teaching and preaching which had completed the change in him from the careless to the earnest student of theology.  Clarke’s spirituality and purity of life, his singleness of aim, his earnest striving after a standard of holiness seldom to be found even amongst those who professed to practise the higher life, aroused the deep admiration of the impulsive and warm-hearted Dalaber.  He sought his rooms, he loved to hear his discourses, he called himself his pupil and his son, and was the most regular and enthusiastic attender of his lectures and disputations.

And now he had taken a new and forward step.  Suddenly he seemed to have been launched upon a tide with which hitherto he had only dallied and played.  He was pushing out his bark into deeper waters, and already felt as though the cables binding him to the shores of safety and ease were completely parted.

It was in part due to the magnetic personality of Garret that this thing had come to pass.  When Dalaber left Oxford it was with no idea that it would be a crisis in his life.  He wished, out of curiosity, to be present at the strange ceremony to be enacted in St. Paul’s Churchyard; and the knowledge that Clarke was going to London for a week on some private business gave the finishing touch to his resolution.