the limpid purity of the spring sky. A light wind flapped the
travel-stained, high-collared blue cloth cloak which he wore; and brought
him both the haunting fetid-sweet reek of the mud flats--the tide being
low--and the invigorating tang of the forest and moorland, uprolling
there ahead, in purple and umber to the pale northern horizon. Against
that sombre background, fair and stately in the tender sunlight as a
church of vision or dream, Marychurch Abbey rose above the roofs and
chimneys of the little town.

During the latter half of the eighteenth century, not only were
religious systems very much at a discount among persons of intelligence,
but the Deity himself was relegated to the position of an exploded idea,
becoming an object of vituperation, witty or obscene according to the
humour of the individual critic. As one of the illuminated, Mr. Verity
did not escape the prevailing infection, although an inborn amenity of
disposition saved him from atheism in its more blatantly offensive forms.
The existence of the Supreme Being might be, (probably was) so he feared,
but "a fond thing vainly imagined". Yet such is the constitution of the
human mind that age confers a certain prestige and authority even upon
phantoms and suspected frauds. Hence it followed that Mr. Verity, in the
plenitude of his courtesy, had continued to take off his hat--secretly
and subjectively at all events--to this venerable theological delusion,
so dear through unnumbered centuries to the aching heart and troubled
conscience of humanity.

But in the present glad hour of restored security--his head no longer in
danger of plopping, hideously bodiless, into _la veuve's_ basket, his
inner-man, moreover, so recently and rackingly evacuated by that
abominable Channel passage, now comfortably relined with Tandy's meat and
drink--he went further in the way of acknowledgment. A glow of very vital