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He seldom looked back on those times, and yet he never looked back on them without seeing them as days of youth and hope as well as of darkness. There was a glamour about them: he saw them lit up like a city at night, and turned to them almost with longing from the milk-and-water landscape of his present existence—whether at the Parsonage or at the Manor mattered nothing. Even this new adventure of the oath was but a poor, dry, desiccated affair, a crusade of pedants, leading nowhere. . . . He would end his days as Charles's pensioner—he saw that now.

He wondered what had happened to those others who had been with him—le Thisay himself and de la Sourmaise, and the two brothers from Châtençeau. Were they all now as old and disappointed and obscure as he? He was never likely to know. These Frenchmen who were now pouring into the district would never have heard of them. They came from a different part of France—they would never have heard. . . . But surely so much learning and so much experiment could not have been without fruit. For all the years he had been with them he seemed to have been hanging on the verge of some tremendous discovery—powers hitherto unrealized. Yet, if such powers had been discovered, by this time the world must have known it . . . the Abbé had told him it was all useless and worse, all darkness, a mere blind alley of science. But then the Abbé had been prejudiced by his refusal to accept the Romish faith and by the suspicion that this science had dissuaded him . . . as doubtless it had at the moment, though he had better reasons now. He had had the choice between submission and power, and he had chosen power. Yet where was his power? That too was gone—he had let it slip from him while his hand grasped at riches—riches and honour, and he had lost those too . . .