rst he heard a blurred murmuring, then he became aware
that some of the men were looking at him curiously, that one of them had
addressed him. He smiled apologetically.

"I beg your pardon. I--I couldn't have been listening."

"I merely asked," repeated Floud, "how you expect to satisfy humanity
with the vague hope that you would substitute for the Christian promise
of eternal life."

He stared stupidly at the questioner.

"I--I don't know." He passed a hand slowly upward over his forehead.
"Really I can hardly trouble about those matters--there's so much life
to live. I think I knew a moment ago, but I seem to have forgotten,
though it's doubtless no great loss. I dare say it's more important to
be unafraid of life than to be unafraid of death."

"You were full of reasons a moment ago," reminded Whittaker--"some of
them not uninteresting."

"Was I? Oh, well, it's a small matter--I've somehow lost hold of it." He
laughed awkwardly. "It seems to have come to me just now that those who
study an apple until it falls from its stem and rots are even more
foolish than those who pluck and eat."

Again he was silent, with a great hidden impatience for them to be gone.
But Whittaker, the wicked Unitarian, detained them still a moment
longer.

"How hardly we should believe in a God who saved every one!" he breathed
softly to the remains of his cigar.

"Humph! Such a God would be a mere mush of concession!" retorted Floud,
the Baptist.

"And how true," pursued the unruffled Unitarian, "that we cannot worship
a 'mere mush of concession'--how true that our God must hate what we
hate, and punish what we would punish. We might stomach a God who would
save orthodox burglars along with orthodox bishops, but not one who
saved unbaptised infants and adults of unsound doctrine. Dear, dear,
yes! We must have a God with a little human spite in Him or He seems to
be spineless."

"A hopeless cynic," declared the soft voice of the Catholic--"it's the
Unitarianism working out of him, mind you!"

"So glad to have met you!" continued the same good man to Bernal. "Your
words are conducive to thought--you're an earnest, decent lad at all
events."

But Bernal scarcely heard them or identified the speakers. They were to
him but so many noisy wheels of the vast machine, each revolving as it
must. His whole body seemed to send electric sparks of repulsion out to
them to drive them away as quickly as might be. All his energies were
cent