"You find your life here satisfying, I suppose?" he began, his blue eyes looking into the wayside banks for creatures.
"Is any life?" answered Alick, his eyes turned to the vague distance.
"Not fully: the spirit of progress, working by discontent, forbids the social stagnation of rest and thankfulness; but we can come to something that suffices for our daily wants if it does not satisfy all our longings. Work in harmony with our nature, and doing good here and there when we can, both these help us on. But the work must be harmonious and the good we do manifest."
"So far as that goes, Church-work is pleasant to me—all, indeed, I care for or am fit for; but North Aston is stony ground," said Alick.
"Can you wonder? When the husbandman-in-chief is such a man as Mr. Birkett, you must make your account with stones and weeds. The spiritual cannot flourish under the hand of the unspiritual; and, considering the pastor, the flock is far from bad."
"That may be, but we do not like to live only in comparatives," said Alick. "I confess I should be happier in a cure where I was more of one mind with my rector than I am here, and not decried or ridiculed on account of every scheme for good that I might propose. Parish-work here is shamefully neglected, but Mr. Birkett will not let me do anything to mend it."
"Ah!" said Mr. Gryce, catching a luckless curculio by the way, "that is bad. A more harmonious one would certainly be, as you say, far more agreeable. Or a little parish of your own—a parish, however small, which would be all your own, and you not under the control of any one below your diocesan? How would that do? That would be my affair if I were in the Church."
Alick's face lightened. "Yes," he said, "that is my dream—at least one of them. I would not care how small the place might be, if I had supreme control and might work unhindered in my own way."
"It will come," said Mr. Gryce cheerily. "All things come in time to him who knows how to wait."
"Ah, if I could believe that!" sighed Alick, thinking of Leam.