By taking responsibility for the disposal of Abel's business and doing so completely honestly, despite overwhelming temptations to the contrary, Rhys is enabled to go to college with the support of Abel's elderly spinster sister and Thomas Bartley. He does creditably there, despite the disadvantages of his poor upbringing, and is surprised to find himself called to be the minister of the Calvinistic Methodist chapel in which he was brought up. However, he feels he cannot accept the call because of the shame that his family bears due to the antics of his Uncle James and (he suspects) his father. On the same day as he receives the call from his chapel, he learns that Uncle James has died in prison in Birmingham. Desperate to find whether Uncle James might have said anything to anyone about his father before he died, he travels to Birmingham and, following a complex sequence of events, comes face to face with his father. The experience is deeply traumatic, but clears the way for him to accept the call to the ministry and he pursues a short but successful career as a Calvinistic Methodist minister before dying relatively young from a wasting disease (very likely tuberculosis). The whole novel is presented as if it were the autobiography he wrote between being forced to retire from the ministry and his eventual death.