u are horribly sorry it is all the better. You have
only to go and tell the priest so and he will give you God out of his
own hands."

"I hate your priest and I deny your God!" cried the man, "and I tell you
God is a lie and a fable and a mask. And for the first time in my life I
do not feel superior to God."

"What can it all mean?" said Madeleine, in massive wonder.

"Because I am a fable also and a mask," said the man. He had been
plucking fiercely at his black beard and hair all the time; now he
suddenly plucked them off and flung them like moulted feathers in the
mire. This extraordinary spoliation left in the sunlight the same face,
but a much younger head--a head with close chestnut curls and a short
chestnut beard.

"Now you know the truth," he answered, with hard eyes. "I am a cad who
has played a crooked trick on a quiet village and a decent woman for a
private reason of his own. I might have played it successfully on any
other woman; I have hit the one woman on whom it cannot be played. It's
just like my damned luck. The plain truth is," and here when he came to
the plain truth he boggled and blundered as Evan had done in telling it
to the girl in the motor-car.

"The plain truth is," he said at last, "that I am James Turnbull the
atheist. The police are after me; not for atheism but for being ready to
fight for it."

"I saw something about you in a newspaper," said the girl, with a
simplicity which even surprise could never throw off its balance.

"Evan MacIan said there was a God," went on the other, stubbornly, "and
I say there isn't. And I have come to fight for the fact that there
is no God; it is for that that I have seen this cursed island and your
blessed face."

"You want me really to believe," said Madeleine, with parted lips, "that
you think----"

"I want you to hate me!" cried Turnbull, in agony. "I want you to be
sick when you think of my name. I am sure there is no God."

"But there is," said Madeleine, quite quietly, and rather with the air
of one telling children about an elephant. "Why, I touched His body only
this morning."

"You touched a bit of bread," said Turnbull, biting his knuckles. "Oh, I
will say anything that can madden you!"

"You think it is only a bit of bread," said the girl, and her lips
tightened ever so little.

"I know it is only a bit of bread," said Turnbull, with violence.

She flung back her open face and smiled. "Then why did you refuse to eat
it?" s