e stopped while Audrey pointed out
the beauty of the scene with her little air of unique appreciation.
"Isn't it too lovely for words? The suggestion--the mystery of it!" Her
voice had a passionate impatience, as if she chafed at the limitations
of the language. "Who says London's cold and grey? It's blue. And yet
what would it be without the haze?" Wyndham smiled inscrutably: perhaps
he wondered what Miss Audrey Craven would be without the haze?

"What did you think of the service?" she asked presently. By this time
she and Wyndham were walking together a little in advance of the others.

"I didn't hear it. I was watching Flaxman Reed all the time." This
statement, as Audrey well knew, was not strictly correct.

"So was I. My uncle says if he stays in the church he'll be the coming
man."

"The coming man? H'm. He's been going back ever since I knew him. At
present he's got to the thirteenth century; he may arrive at the Nicene
age, but he'll never have a hold on his own. He's nothing but a holy
anachronism."

"Oh? I thought you didn't understand him?"

"In one way I do, in another I don't. You see I knew him at Oxford when
I was a happy undergraduate." (Audrey could not imagine Langley Wyndham
ever being an undergraduate; it seemed to her that he must always have
been a Master of Arts.) "I knew the real Flaxman Reed, and he was as
logical a sceptic as you or I. There was an epidemic of ideas in our
time, and the poor fellow was frightened, so he took it--badly. Of
course he made up his mind that he was going to die, and he was horribly
afraid of dying. So instead of talking about his interesting symptoms,
as you or I might do" ("You or I"--again that flattering association!),
"he quietly got rid of the disease by attacking its source."

"How?"

"Well, I forget the precise treatment, but I think he took equal parts
of St. Augustine and St. Thomas Aquinas, diluted with _aqua sacra_. He
gave me the prescription, but I preferred the disease."

"At any rate he was in earnest."

"Deadly earnest. That's the piety of the fraud."

"You surely don't call him a fraud?"

"Well--a self-deceiver. Isn't that the completest and most fatal form of
fraud? He fights and struggles to be what he isn't and calls it
renouncing self."

"He renounces the world too--and everything that's pleasant."

"I'm afraid that doesn't impress me. I can't forget that he renounced
reason because it was unpleasant. Rather than bear a little