thought of Father Payne ran in my mind, I regarded him with a singular
mixture of interest, liking, admiration, and dread. Yet he had contrived to
kindle a curious flame in my mind. It was not that I fully understood what
he was working for, but I was conscious of a great desire to prove to him
that I could do something, exhibit some tenacity, approve myself to him. I
wanted to make him retract what he had said about me; and, further on, I
had a dim sense of an initiation into ideas, familiar enough, but which had
only been words to me hitherto--power, purpose, seriousness. They had been
ideas which before this had just vaguely troubled my peace, clouds hanging
in a bright sky. I had the sense that there were some duties which I ought
to perform, efforts to be made, ends to fulfil; but they had seemed to me
expressed in rather priggish phrases, words which oppressed me, and ruffled
the surface of my easy joy. Now they loomed up before me as big realities
which could not be escaped, hills to climb, with no pleasant path round
about their bases. I seemed in sight of some inspiring secret. I could not
tell what it was, but Father Payne knew it, might show it me?

Thus I drowsed and woke, a dozen times, till in the glimmer of the early
light I rose and drew back my curtains. The dawn was struggling up fitfully
in the east, among cloudy bars, tipping and edging them with smouldering
flashes of light, and there was a lustrous radiance in the air. Then, to my
surprise, looking down at the silent garden, pale with dew, I saw the great
figure of Father Payne, bare-headed, wrapt in a cloak, pacing solidly and,
I thought, happily among the shrubberies, stopping every now and then to
watch the fiery light and to breathe the invigorating air--and I felt then
that, whatever he might be doing, he at all events _was_ something, in
a sense which applied to but few people I knew. He was not hard,
unimaginative, fenced in by stupidity and self-righteousness from
unhappiness and doubt, as were some of the men accounted successful whom I
knew. No, it was something positive, some self-created light, some stirring