. Really,
if this continues, Mr. Linford, I shall be obliged--"

"A case of it--of this blankness of mine. Instead of continuing my early
prejudice, which I now recall was preposterously in your favour, I survey
you coldly for the first time. You know I'm afraid to look at print for
fear I've forgotten how to read."

"Nonsense!"

"No--I tell you I feel exactly like one of those chaps from another
planet, who are always reaching here in the H.G. Wells's stories--a
gentleman of fine attainments in his own planet, mind you--bland,
agreeable, scholarly--with marked distinction of bearing, and a personal
beauty rare even on a planet where the flaunting of one's secretest bones
is held to betoken the only beauty--you understand _that?_--Well, I come
here, and everything is different--ideals of beauty, people absurdly
holding for flesh on their bones, for example--numbers, language,
institutions, everything. Of course, it puzzles me a little, but see the
value I ought to be to the world, having a mature mind, yet one as clean
of preconceptions and prejudice as a new-born babe's."

"Oh, so that is why you could see that I'm not--"

"Also, why I could see that you _are_--that's it, smile! Nance, you _are_
a dear, when you smile--you make a man feel so strong and protecting. But
if you knew all the queer things I've thought in the last week about time
and people and the world. This morning I woke up mad because I'd been
cheated out of the past. Where _is_ all the past, Nance? There's just as
much past somewhere as there is future--if one's soul has no end, it had
no beginning. Why not worry about the past as we do about the future?
First thing I'm going to do--start a Worry-About-the-Past Club, with dues
and a president, and by-laws and things!"

"Don't you think I'd better send Clytie, now?"

"No; please wait a minute." He clutched her hand with a new strength, and
raised on his elbow to face her, then, speaking lower:

"Nance, you know I've had a feeling it wasn't the right thing to ask the
old gentleman this--he might think I hadn't been studying at college--but
_you_ tell me--what is this about the atoning blood of Jesus Christ? It
was a phrase he used the other day, and it stuck in my mind."

"Bernal--you surely know!"

"Truly I don't--it seems a bad dream I've had some time--that's all--some
awful dream about my father."

"It was the part of the Saviour to purchase our redemption by his death on
Calvary."

"O