“All right, Daddy; don’t strain yourself.  It’s jolly down here, isn’t it?” She got up, stretched herself a little, and moved away, looking like a very tall child, with her short hair curling in round her head.

Pierson, watching her vanish past the curtain, thought:  ’What a lovely thing she is!’ And he got up too, but instead of following, went to the piano, and began to play Mendelssohn’s Prelude and Fugue in E minor.  He had a fine touch, and played with a sort of dreamy passion.  It was his way out of perplexities, regrets, and longings; a way which never quite failed him.

At Cambridge, he had intended to take up music as a profession, but family tradition had destined him for Holy Orders, and an emotional Church revival of that day had caught him in its stream.  He had always had private means, and those early years before he married had passed happily in an East-End parish.  To have not only opportunity but power to help in the lives of the poor had been fascinating; simple himself, the simple folk of his parish had taken hold of his heart.  When, however, he married Agnes Heriot, he was given a parish of his own on the borders of East and West, where he had been ever since, even after her death had nearly killed him.  It was better to go on where work and all reminded him of one whom he had resolved never to forget in other ties.  But he knew that his work had not the zest it used to have in her day, or even before her day.  It may well be doubted whether he, who had been in Holy Orders twenty-six years, quite knew now what he believed.  Everything had become circumscribed, and fixed, by thousands of his own utterances; to have taken fresh stock of his faith, to have gone deep into its roots, would have been like taking up the foundations of a still-standing house.  Some men naturally root themselves in the inexpressible—­for which one formula is much the same as another; though Edward Pierson, gently dogmatic, undoubtedly preferred his High-Church statement of the inexpressible to that of, say, the Zoroastrians.  The subtleties of change, the modifications by science, left little sense of inconsistency or treason on his soul.  Sensitive, charitable, and only combative deep down, he instinctively avoided discussion on matters where he might hurt others or they hurt him.  And, since explanation was the last thing which o could be expected of one who did not base himself on Reason, he had found but scant occasion ever to examine anything.  Just as in the old Abbey he had soared off into the infinite with the hawk, the beetles, and the grasses, so now, at the piano, by these sounds of his own making, he was caught away again into emotionalism, without realising that he was in one of his, most religious moods.

“Aren’t you coming to tea, Edward?”