f an unclean spirit.
He was anxious to forget such grossness in the cool twilight of his tall
Gothic cloisters; but on that morning it was fated that his still round
of religious exercises should be everywhere arrested by small shocks.
As he entered the church, hitherto always empty at that hour, a kneeling
figure rose hastily to its feet and came towards the full daylight of
the doorway. When the curate saw it he stood still with surprise. For
the early worshipper was none other than the village idiot, a nephew of
the blacksmith, one who neither would nor could care for the church or
for anything else. He was always called "Mad Joe," and seemed to have
no other name; he was a dark, strong, slouching lad, with a heavy white
face, dark straight hair, and a mouth always open. As he passed the
priest, his moon-calf countenance gave no hint of what he had been doing
or thinking of. He had never been known to pray before. What sort of
prayers was he saying now? Extraordinary prayers surely.

Wilfred Bohun stood rooted to the spot long enough to see the idiot go
out into the sunshine, and even to see his dissolute brother hail him
with a sort of avuncular jocularity. The last thing he saw was the
colonel throwing pennies at the open mouth of Joe, with the serious
appearance of trying to hit it.

This ugly sunlit picture of the stupidity and cruelty of the earth sent
the ascetic finally to his prayers for purification and new thoughts.
He went up to a pew in the gallery, which brought him under a coloured
window which he loved and always quieted his spirit; a blue window
with an angel carrying lilies. There he began to think less about the
half-wit, with his livid face and mouth like a fish. He began to think
less of his evil brother, pacing like a lean lion in his horrible
hunger. He sank deeper and deeper into those cold and sweet colours of
silver blossoms and sapphire sky.

In this place half an hour afterwards he was found by Gibbs, the village
cobbler, who had been sent for him in some haste. He got to his feet
with promptitude, for he knew that no small matter would have brought
Gibbs into such a place at all. The cobbler was, as in many villages,
an atheist, and his appearance in church was a shade more extraordinary
than Mad Joe's. It was a morning of theological enigmas.

"What is it?" asked Wilfred Bohun rather stiffly, but putting out a
trembling hand for his hat.

The atheist spoke in a tone that, coming from