How dull the streets were! Into the far dark, the splendour of Barbara had vanished. Various memories of her—now this look, now that, a dress, a laugh, a certain button half-torn from her riding habit, the feeling of her foot in his hand as he lifted her to Miss Brown’s back—would enter his heart. The way she drove the nails into her mare’s hoof, the way she put her hand on his shoulder as she slid from the saddle, the commanding love with which she spoke to the great animal, and the way Miss Brown received it, the sweet coaxing respect she showed his blacksmith grandfather—a thousand attendant shadows glided in procession through his brain and heart.

He forgot the bus and went tramping through the streets with his bags—he had sent home his heavier things earlier—thinking of Barbara. That Barbara was lovely, was no reason why Richard should not love her! that she was rich, was no reason why he should forget her! She came into his life as a star ascends above the horizon of the world. In her presence he was at once rebuked and uplifted. She was a power within him. He could not believe in God, but neither could he think belief in such a God as she believed in degrading.

He said to himself that everything depended on the kind of God you believed in, and that the kind of God depended on the kind of woman. He wondered how many ideas of God there might be, for every one who believed in him must have a different idea.

“Some of them must be nearer right than others!” he said to himself, not perceiving that he was beginning to entertain the notion of a real God.

For he saw that the notions of the best men and women must be similar. He was not far from thinking that such lines must point to some object, rather than an empty center. The idea of the best men and women must be a believable idea, might be a true idea, might therefore be a real existence.

He had not yet come to consider the fact, that the best of men said he knew God, that God was like himself, only greater, that whoever would do what he told him should know that God, and know that he spoke the truth concerning him, and said finally that he had come from God as a witness of him that he was truth and love. Richard had indeed started on a path pointing in such directions, but as yet it was all but the vaguest speculation with him.