Horatia frequently, but, disguise it as he might, this privilege was not entirely pleasurable. He had lost the mother to whom he was devoted, and now the Gospel according to Whately was beginning to fail him. Slowly and bitterly it came to him that the "manly, reasonable, moderate, not too other-worldly faith and practice" which had once satisfied him had done so only because he was young, and because things were going well with him. When he went in to Oxford to see Dormer, now in Orders and Fellow of Oriel, he came across Whately more than once, and felt the chill that one feels in meeting a person the glamour of whose influence has departed.

But more and more he found himself a constant visitor at Oriel, until, as a privileged person, he came to be almost included in the circle of Dormer's friends there. These, without, exception, belonged to the new Oriel school, who were in reaction from speculation to authority, and, like John Keble, their guide, boldly placed character above intellect. Dormer never argued with him now, yet, imperceptibly, the leaven worked.... In the end it was Tristram's own need and his feeling for the needs of others which made him able to cut himself away from all "liberal" trammels and to rank himself under the same banner with the friend who had waited long and patiently for such a change of mind. During the summer term of 1830 he told Dormer that there was now no reason why he should not be ordained.

He had told Dormer something else too—the something which he had been discussing this very evening with Mr. Grenville, the something which was engrossing his whole thoughts as he rode homewards under the infant moon—his intention of again asking Horatia to marry him. There had never been any other woman for him. He knew her very well; he was no stranger even to her faults—little flecks making more beautiful a beautiful flower, they seemed to him, for he had a profound belief in her, a sort of intuitive faith in the real, secret Horatia whom sometimes she seemed to delight in hiding up—the woman with a capacity for great things. And the more he knew her the more he desired her. The thought that, when the time seemed favourable, he was going to stake his happiness on another throw, shook him. It haunted his sleep that night in a harassing dream, relic of their conversation at supper, wherein he was feverishly trying to build up a dyke against a flood of water that poured and pushed upon it, and Horatia, dressed in the robes of the Provost of Oriel, was laughing at him and telling him not to be absurd, for the water had to come. Then, with her garden trowel, she had herself made a little breach in the bank, and at that a smooth wave had slipped over and carried her away, still laughing; and he woke, in a horror for which he could scarcely account, and lay wakeful till dawn.