the
result.

She pushed him from her. "Oh, go, go!" she cried. "Quick go! You pretend,
but you do not love me. Why you give me money, the flowers, if you do not
want me? Go quick. Come never to see me again!"

Peter did the only thing he could do; he went. "Good-bye," he said
cheerfully at the door. "I hope you will be better soon. I didn't mean to
be a beast to you. Give the flowers to Lucienne if you don't want them;
she will be able to wear them to-night. Cheerio. Good-bye-ee!"

"Good-bye-ee!" she echoed after him. And he closed the door on her life.

In front of the Hotel de Ville he met Arnold, returning from the club,
and the two men walked off together. In a moment of impulse he related
the whole story to him. "Now," he said, "what do you make of all that?"

Arnold was very moved. It was not his way to say much, but he walked on
silently for a long time. Then he said: "The Potter makes many vessels,
but never one needlessly. I hold on to that. And He can remake the broken
clay."

"Are you sure?" asked Peter.

"I am," said Arnold. "It's not in the Westminster Confession, nor in the
Book of Common Prayer, nor, for all I know, in the Penny Catechism, but I
believe it. God Almighty must be stronger than the devil, Graham."

Peter considered this. Then he shook his head. "That won't wash, Arnold,"
he said. "If God is stronger than the devil, so that the devil is never
ultimately going to succeed, I can see no use in letting him have his
fling at all. And I've more respect for the devil than to think he'd take
it. It's childish to suppose the existence of two such forces at a
perpetual game of cheat. Either there is no devil and there is no
hell--in which case I reckon that there is no heaven either, for a heaven
would not be a heaven if it were not attained, and there would be no true
attainment if there were no possibility of failure--or else there are all
three. And if there are all three, the devil wins out, sometimes, in the
end."

"Then, God is not almighty?"

Peter shrugged his shoulders. "If I breed white mice, I don't lessen my
potential power if I choose to let some loose in the garden to see if the
cat will get them. Besides, in the end I could annihilate the cat if I
wanted to."

"You can't think of God so," cried Arnold sharply.

"Can't I?" demanded Peter. "Well, maybe not, Arnold; I don't know that I
can think of Him at all. But I can face the facts of life, and if I'm not
a coward, I shan