"That won't sell," he said. "You could have handled my theme—if you had tried. By the way, that brother of yours has jumped at Vauxhall's offer. I knew he would. He'll go very far, that young man. Even the Basilica won't be big enough to hold him."
He laughed loudly and strode away.
During July Mark saw Betty regularly twice a week. Archibald was working harder than ever in and out of St. Anne's parish, but of the Basilica, now nearing completion, not a word was said by either husband or wife. Mark wondered if Betty knew. Her recovery was slow and intermittent.
"Are you worried about anything?" Mark asked one day.
"Yes," she admitted, after a minute's hesitation; then she continued quickly, "Have you noticed another falling off in Archie's sermons?"
"He's unequal, of course," Mark replied. "And the best brains refuse to work in a tired body."
"I wish you'd say a word about that. He'd take anything from you."
Again she caught a glimpse of that derisive smile of Mark's which she could not interpret, as he promised to speak to his brother. Did he reap his reward when Betty said, three weeks later, "Archie has preached splendidly the last two Sundays. Has he told you that he has been commanded to preach again at Windsor?"
Mark nodded rather coldly, so Betty thought. He reflected that he was the man with one talent. How much better that it should be given to the man who had ten rather than be atrophied by disuse, buried, so to speak, in one upon whom silence was imposed. Every pang of envy which twisted his heart he tried to assuage with the anodyne of kind actions. But the faith which had never failed him when he was sick seemed to have forsaken him utterly now that he was whole.
When The Songs of the Angels was half written, telegrams summoned Mark and his brothers to Pitt Hall, where the Squire lay dying, senseless and speechless. He had been seized with a fit, after returning from a long day's hunting on Christmas Eve. The doctors said at once that nothing could be done. Pitt Hall was hung with holly and mistletoe; and Mark, coming out of the room where his father lay dead, saw the servants pulling down the decorations. It seemed to him that the old house would never be the same again. It never was—to him.