"Don't you think I'd better turn back?" he asked her, gently. "Your path
is clear before you." He pointed to it winding through the fern. "And you
know, I hope, that anything I could do for you and your mother during
your stay here I should be only too enchanted to do. The one thing I
shrink from doing is to interfere in any way with her rest here. And I am
afraid just now I might be a disturbing element."

"No, no! please come!" said Mary, earnestly. Then as she turned her head
away, she added: "Of course--there is nothing new--to her--"

"Except that my fight is waged from inside the Church--and your father's
from outside. But that might make all the difference to her."

"I don't think so. It is"--she faltered--"the change itself. It is all so
terrible to her."

"Any break with the old things? But doesn't it ever present itself to
her--force itself upon her--as the upwelling of a new life?" he asked,
sadly.

"Ah!--if it didn't in my father's case--"

The girl's eyes filled with tears.

But she quickly checked herself, and they moved on in silence. Meynell,
with his pastoral instinct and training, longed to probe and soothe the
trouble he divined in her. A great natural dignity in the girl--delicacy
of feeling in the man--prevented it.

None the less her betrayal of emotion had altered their relation; or