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seek, however rarely, to address himself to a new line of thought or group of readers. As he began so he must go on, they say. Yet I have ventured on the history of Rupert Ullershaw's great, and to all appearance successful Platonic experiment, chiefly because this problem interested me: Under the conditions in which fortune placed him in the East, was he right or wrong in clinging to an iron interpretation of a vow of his youth and to the strict letter of his Western Law? And was he bound to return to the English wife who had treated him so ill, as, in the end, he made up his mind to do? In short, should or should not circumstances be allowed to alter moral cases?
The question is solved in one way in this book, but although she herself was a party to that solution, looking at the matter with Mea's eyes it seems capable of a different reading. Still, given a sufficiency of faith, I believe that set down here to be the true answer. Also, whatever its exact cause and nature, there must be something satisfying and noble in utter Renunciation for Conscience' sake, even when surrounding and popular judgment demands no such sacrifice. At least this is one view of Life, its aspirations and possibilities; that which wearies of its native soil, that which lifts its face toward the Stars.
Otherwise, why did those old anchorites wear the stone beds of their cells so thin? Why, in this fashion or in that, do their successors still wear them thin everywhere in the wide earth, especially in the wise and ancient East? I think the reply is Faith: that Faith which bore Rupert and Mea to what they held to be a glorious issue of their long probation--that Faith in personal survival and reunion, without the support of which in one form or another, faint and flickering as it may be, the happiness or even the continuance of our human world is so difficult to imagine.
H. R. H.
THE WAY OF THE SPIRIT
PROLOGUE
The last pitiful shifts of shame, the last agonised doublings of despair when