and at the top of it, in the distance, the glimmering of a large white
house--stately and separate--dominating the village, the church, the
collieries, and the Fox-Wiltons' plantations.

The Rector threw a glance at it. It was from that house had come the
letter he had found on his hall-table that afternoon; a letter in a
handwriting large and impressive like the dim house on the hill. The
handwriting of a man accustomed to command, whether his own ancestral
estate, or the collieries which had been carved out of its fringe, or the
village spreading humbly at his feet, or the church into which he walked
on Sunday with heavy tread, and upright carriage, conscious of his
threefold dignity--as squire, magistrate, and churchwarden.

"It's my business to fight him!" Meynell thought, looking at the house,
and squaring his broad shoulders unconsciously. "It's not my business to
hate him--not at all--rather to respect and sympathize with him. I
provoke the fight--and I may be thankful to have lit on a strong
antagonist. What's Stephen afraid of? What can they do? Let 'em try!"

A smile--contemptuous and good-humoured--crossed the Rector's face. Any
angry bigot determined to rid his parish of a heretical parson might no
doubt be tempted to use other than legal and theological weapons, if he
could get them. A heretic with unpaid bills and some hidden vice is
scarcely in a position to make much of his heresy. But the Rector's smile
showed him humorously conscious of an almost excessive innocence of
private life. The thought of how little an enemy could find to lay hold
on in his history or present existence seemed almost to bring with it a
kind of shamefacedness--as for experience irrevocably foregone, warm,
tumultuous, human experience, among the sinners and sufferers of the
world. For there are odd, mingled moments in the lives of most scholars