youthful namesake and great-great nephew, under circumstances not altogether unworthy of record.

CHAPTER II

ENTER A YOUNG SCHOLAR AND GENTLEMAN OF A HAPPY DISPOSITION AND GOOD PROSPECTS

The four-twenty down train rumbled into Marychurch station, and Tom Verity stepped out of a rather frousty first-class carriage on to the platform. There hot still September sunshine, tempered by a freshness off the sea, met him. The effect was pleasurable, adding delicate zest to the enjoyment of living which already possessed him. Coming from inland, the near neighbourhood of the sea, the sea with its eternal invitation, stirred his blood.

For was not he about to accept the said invitation in its fullest and most practical expression? Witness the fact that, earlier in the day, he had deposited his heavy baggage at that house of many partings, many meetings, Radley's Hotel, Southampton; and journeyed on to Marychurch with a solitary, eminently virgin, cowhide portmanteau, upon the yellow-brown surface of which the words—"Thomas Clarkson Verity, passenger Bombay, first cabin R.M.S. Penang"—were inscribed in the whitest of lettering. His name stood high in the list of successful candidates at the last Indian Civil Service examination. Now he reaped the reward of past endeavour. For with that deposition of heavy baggage at Radley's the last farewell to years of tutelage seemed to him to be spoken. Nursery discipline, the restraints and prohibitions—in their respective degrees—of preparatory school, of Harchester, of Oxford; and, above all and through all, the control and admonitions of his father, the Archdeacon, fell away from him into the limbo of things done with, outworn and outpaced.

This moved him as pathetic, yet as satisfactory also, since it set him free to fix his mind, without lurking suspicion of indecorum, upon the large promise of the future. He could give rein to his eagerness, to his high sense of expectation, while remaining innocent of impiety towards persons and places holding, until now, first claim on his obedience and affection. All this fell in admirably with his natural bent. Self-reliant, agreeably egotistical, convinced of the excellence of his social and mental equipment, Tom was saved from excess of conceit by a lively desire to please, an even more lively sense of humour, and an intelligence to which at this period nothing came amiss in the way of new impressions or experiences.

And, from henceforth, he was his own master, his thoughts, actions, purposes, belonging to himself and to himself alone. Really the position was a little intoxicating! Realizing it, as he sat in the somewhat stuffy first-class carriage, on that brief hour's journey from Southampton to Marychurch, he had laughed out loud, hunching up his shoulders saucily, in a sudden outburst of irrepressible and boyish glee.

But as the line, clearing the purlieus of the great seaport, turns south-westward running through the noble oak and beech woods of Arnewood Forest, crossing its bleak moorlands—silver pink, at the present season, with fading heather—and cutting through its plantations of larch and Scotch fir, Tom Verity's mood sobered. He watched the country reeling away to right and left past the carriage windows, and felt its peculiarly English and sylvan charm. Yet he saw it all through a dazzle, as of mirage, in which floated phantom landscapes strangely different in sentiment and in suggestion.—Some extravagantly luxuriant, as setting to crowded painted cities, some desert, amazingly vacant and desolate; but, in either case, poetic, alluring, exciting, as scenes far removed in climate, faith and civilization from those heretofore familiar can hardly fail to be. India, and all which India stands for in English history, challenged his imagination, challenged his ambition, since in virtue of his nationality, young and inexperienced though he was, he went to her as a natural ruler, the son of a conquering race. And this last thought begot in him not only exultation but an unwonted seriousness. While, as he thus meditated, from out the dazzle as of mirage, a single figure grew into force and distinctness of outline, a figure which from his childhood had appealed to him with an attraction at once sinister and heroic—that, namely, of a certain soldier and ex-Indian official, his kinsman, to pay a politic tribute of respect to whom was the object of his present excursion.

In Catholic countries the World gives its children to the Church. In Protestant countries the process is not infrequently reversed, the Church giving its children to the World, and that with an alacrity which argues remarkable faith and courage—of a sort! Archdeacon Verity had carefully planned this visit for his son, although it obliged the young man to leave home two days earlier than he need otherwise have done. It was illuminating to note how the father brought all the resources of a fine presence, an important manner and full-toned archidiaconal voice to bear upon proving the expediency of the young man visiting this particular relation, over whose career and reputation he had so often, in the past, pursed up his lips and shaken his head for the moral benefit of the domestic circle.

For the Archdeacon, in common with the majority of the Verity family, was animated by that ineradicable distrust of anything approaching genius which distinguishes the English country, or rather county, mind. And that Sir Charles Verity had failed to conform to the family tradition of solid, unemotional, highly respectable, and usually very wealthy, mediocrity was beyond question. He had struck out a line for himself; and, as the event disclosed, an illustrious one. This the Archdeacon, being a good Conservative, disapproved. It worried him sadly, making him actually, if unconsciously, exceedingly jealous. And precisely on that account, by an ingenious inversion of reasoning, he felt he owed it to abstract justice—in other words to his much disgruntled self—to make all possible use of this offending, this renegade personage, when opportunity of so doing occurred. Now, learning on credible authority that Sir Charles's name was still one to conjure with in India, it clearly became his duty to bid his son seek out and secure whatever modicum of advantage—in the matter of advice and introductions—might be derivable from so irritating a source.

All of which, while jumping with his own desires, caused Tom much sly mirth. For might it not be counted among the satisfactory results of his deposition of heavy baggage at Radley's that, for the first time in his life, he was at liberty to regard even his father, Thomas Pontifex Verity, Archdeacon of Harchester and Rector of Canton Magna, in a true perspective? And he laughed again, though this time softly, indulgently, able in the plenitude of youthful superiority to extend a kindly tolerance towards the foibles and ingenuous hypocrisies of poor middle-age.

But here the train, emerging from the broken hilly country on the outskirts of the forest, roared along the embankment which carries the line across the rich converging valleys of the Wilner and the Arne. Tom ceased to think either of possible advantage accruing to his own fortunes, or these defects of the family humour which had combined to dictate his present excursion, his attention being absorbed by the beauty of the immediate outlook. For on the left Marychurch came into view.

The great, grey, long-backed abbey stands on a heart-shaped peninsula of slightly rising ground. Its western tower, land-mark for the valleys and seamark for vessels making the Haven, overtops the avenue of age-old elms which shade the graveyard. Close about the church, the red brick and rough-cast houses of the little market-town—set in a wide margin of salt-marsh and meadow intersected by blue-brown