mind helping me mark this place where we are?"

"Why?"

"Look here, you won't think I'm pretending? but I believe I was
converted at that moment."

Chator's well-known look of alarm that always followed one of Michael's
doctrinal or liturgical announcements was more profound than it had ever
been before.

"Converted?" he gasped. "What to?"

"Oh, not _to_ anything," said Michael. "Only different from what I was
just now, and I want to mark the place."

"Do you mean--put up a cross or something?"

"No, not a cross. Because, when I was converted, I felt a sudden feeling
of being frightfully alive. I'd rather put a stone and plant harebells
round it. We can dig with our spanners. I like stones. They're so
frightfully old, and I'd like to think, if I was ever a long way from
here, of my stone and the harebells looking at it--every year new
harebells and the same old stone."

"Do you know what I think you are?" enquired Chator solemnly. "I think
you're a mystic."

"I never can understand what a mystic was," said Michael.

"Nobody can," said Chator encouragingly. "But lots of them were made
saints all the same. I don't think you ever will be, because you do put
forward the most awfully dangerous doctrines. I do think you ought to be
careful about that. I do really."

Chator was spluttering under the embarrassment of his own eloquence, and
Michael, delicately amused, looked at him with a quizzical smile. Chator
was older than Michael, and by reason of the apoplectic earnestness of
his appearance and manner, and the natural goodness of him so sincerely,
if awkwardly expressed, he had a certain influence which Michael
admitted to himself, however much in the public eye he might affect to
patronize Chator from his own intellectual eminence. Along the road of
speculation, however, Michael would not allow Chator's right to curb
him, and he took a wilful pleasure in galloping ahead over the wildest,
loftiest paths. To shock old Chator was Michael's delight; and he never
failed to do so.

"You see," Chator spluttered, "it's not so much what you say now; nobody
would pay any attention to you, and I know you don't mean half what you
say; but later on you'll begin to believe in all these heretical ideas
of your own. You'll end up by being an Agnostic. Oh, yes you will," he
raged with torrential prophecies, as Michael leaned over the seat of his
bicycle laughing consumedly. "You'll go on and on wondering this and
that and