"Yes," said Saphir gruffly. He put on his hat and went out.
"He's not infallible," Pynsent muttered angrily.
"Then you advise me to g-go on? No; you are too honest to do that. I shall not go on, Pynsent; but I don't regret the last three years. They would have been wasted indeed if they had b-b-blinded me to the truth concerning my powers."
"What will you do, Mark?"
"I don't know—yet," said Mark.
Mark returned to England, where he learned of Betty's conquests. The Duke of Brecon, so Lady Randolph told him, had to marry a million, otherwise he might have offered Miss Kirtling the strawberry leaves. Harry Kirtling, the cousin, very handsome, and a passionate protester, wooed in vain, much to the Admiral's dismay, a dismay tempered by Betty's assurance that she did not wish to leave her uncle for many a long year. A prosperous rector proposed in a letter which began: "My dear Miss Kirtling,—After much earnest thought and fervent prayer, I write to entreat you to become my wife...." This gentleman was a widower on the ripe side of forty. Pynsent, too, confessed that had he not been bond to Art, he might have become Betty's slave.
Mark saw her on the day when she was presented at Court, on the day when she held a small court herself at Randolph House, after she had kissed her sovereign's hand. Like the young man in the parable, Mark went away from Belgrave Square very sorrowful, because Betty seemed so rich and he was so poor.
About this time he met the future Bishop-Suffragan of Poplar, David Ross, then head of the Camford Mission. A man of extraordinary personal magnetism, Ross had begun by challenging public attention as the champion middle-weight boxer of his year. He possessed a small forest in Sutherland and abundant private means; but, to the amazement of his friends, he took Orders and accepted a curacy in the East End. His lodge in Sutherland was turned into a sanatorium, whither were sent at his expense clergymen who had broken down in health. David Ross had the highlander's prophetic faculty and intuition. Where others crawled, he leaped to conclusions respecting his fellow-creatures. When he met Mark, for instance, he divined his mental condition: the suffering denied expression, the disappointment, the humiliation. But he divined far more—something of which Mark himself was unconscious: a religious mind, religious in the sense in which Bishop Butler interpreted the word—submissive to the will of God. This quality in combination with a passionate energy and determination to win his way arrested Ross's attention and captivated his interest. He asked Mark to become a guest at the Mission.
Here the almost invincible odds against which a dozen men were struggling whetted to keen edge Mark's vitality and love of fighting. Listening to David Ross, it seemed incredible that he should have pinned his ambition to the painting of a picture. At the end of a couple of months' hard work in the slums he said abruptly to Ross: "If I can overcome my confounded stammer, I shall take Orders."
Ross held his glance.