Strange Stories

such a nice set of men, especially Mr. Owen, of Christchurch. Meenie had never been so near falling in love with anybody in her life as she was

. There was an heretical tinge about him which made him doubly interesting to the Rector's daughter. The afternoon water party that eventful Thursday, down to Nuneham, she lo

after their picnic luncheon, by the side of the weir under the shadow of the Nuneham

ly with my Church. I was very young when they selected me to go to Oxford, and my opinions have decidedly wavered a go

rious. "Do you know," he said, "when I first came to Christchurch, I doubted even whether I ought to make your brother's acquaintance because he was a clergyman's son. I was taught to describe clergymen always as priests of Midian." He never talked about

em priests of Midian

lieves his overburdened mind by a great effort,

ences," Meenie answered; and she might trut

ome its next Apostle, and I have been educated at their expense both in London and here. You know," Paul added with

ly; "but he told me, too, you were none the less a true g

s. But ever since I came to Oxford I have slowly begun to hesitate and to falter. When I came up first, the men laughed at me a good deal in a good-humoured way, because I wouldn't do as they did. Then I thought myself persecuted for the truth's sake, and was glad. But the men were really very kind and forbearing to me; they never argued with me or bullied me; they respected my scruples, and said

the cricket club

in the boat, and wear a Christchurch ribbon on my hat. I have given up protesting against having my letters addressed to me as Esquire (though I have reall

to burden your conscience with," she said, "I d

was reading for Mods, I don't think I was so unsettled in my mind. But since I have begun reading philosophy for my Greats, I have had to go into all sorts of deep books-Mill, and Spencer, and Bain, and all kinds of fello

ered demurely. She was beginni

eed, and on the Apostle as an almost divinely inspired man. My whole life has been bound up in it; I have worked and read night and day in order to pass high and do honour to the Church; and now what do I begin to find the Church really is? A petty group of poor, devoted, enthusiastic, ignorant people, led blindly by a decently instructed b

wider ideas; and the wider world has converted you, instead of your converting the w

me it is harder-o

looked forward to

bles me, though I did hope that I might help in my way to make the world a new earth; but it is the shock and downfall of their hopes to all t

response. "They have set their hearts all their lives long on your accomplishin

e another a few m

to have your doubts?" Mee

esitate more about the fundamental article of our faith. Even now, I am not su

"it comes perilously near--" and she broke o

continued boldly, turning his big eyes

other. Just at that moment the Professor's wife came up to interrupt the tête-à-tête; "for that

ung to him still in spite of all his faltering changes of opinion. Had he said more than he thought and felt about the Apostle? Even if he was going to revise his views, was it right, was it candid, was it loyal to the truth, that he should revise them under the biassing influence of Meenie's eyes? If only he could have separated the two questions-the Apostle's mission, and the something which

he lit his little reading lamp and sat down in the big chair by the bay window. Running his eyes over his bookshelf, he took out, half by chance, Spencer's "Sociology." Then, from sheer weariness, he read on for a while, hardly heeding what he read. At last he got interested, and finished a chapter. When he had finished it, he put the book down, and felt that the struggle was over. Strange that side by side in the same world, in the same London, there should exist tw

their party on to the Christchurch barge to see the race, and he was strolling with them afterwards round the meadow walk by the bank

s half disappointed that he didn't, for they were both very young, and very young people fall in love so unaffectedly-"I hav

Meenie, simply. "T

really been obtaining my education, so to speak, under false pretences. I can't continue taking these good people's money after I have ceased to belie

t you don't mean to leave Oxford without

r a fellowship is my best chance of repaying these poor peo

Meenie. "You are bound in hono

ll that money was paid off. "Fortunately," he said, "I have lived economically, and have not spent nearly as much as they guaranteed. I got scholarships up to a hundred a year of

will get a fellowship, and in

choolmaster, or a barrister, or something of that sort, and never repay them for their self-sacrifice and devotion in mak

the Apostolate lies far deeper than that. It was

tly, with a changed expression-"Meeni

had been Paul to her all her life long, "I can wait if

t on partly upon that; and then I can take

e might till he could take his degree; that he was then to pay off all the back debt; and that after all these things he and Meenie might get comfortably married whenever they were able.

erstand that she has allowed Meenie to go and get herself engaged to some Dissenter fellow, a Shaker, or a Mormon, or a Communist, or something of the sort, who is the son of a common labourer, and has been sent up to Oxford, Tom tells me, by his own sect, to be made into