modern world regarded
his world as a bubble. No cruelty could have shown it, but their
kindness showed it with a ghastly clearness. As he was brooding, he
suddenly became conscious of a small, stern figure, fronting him
in silence. Its eyes were grey and awful, and its beard red. It was
Turnbull.

"Well, sir," said the editor of _The Atheist_, "where is the fight to
be? Name the field, sir."

Evan stood thunderstruck. He stammered out something, he knew not what;
he only guessed it by the answer of the other.

"Do I want to fight? Do I want to fight?" cried the furious
Free-thinker. "Why, you moonstruck scarecrow of superstition, do you
think your dirty saints are the only people who can die? Haven't you
hung atheists, and burned them, and boiled them, and did they ever deny
their faith? Do you think we don't want to fight? Night and day I have
prayed--I have longed--for an atheist revolution--I have longed to see
your blood and ours on the streets. Let it be yours or mine?"

"But you said..." began MacIan.

"I know," said Turnbull scornfully. "And what did you say? You damned
fool, you said things that might have got us locked up for a year, and
shadowed by the coppers for half a decade. If you wanted to fight, why
did you tell that ass you wanted to? I got you out, to fight if you want
to. Now, fight if you dare."

"I swear to you, then," said MacIan, after a pause. "I swear to you that
nothing shall come between us. I swear to you that nothing shall be in
my heart or in my head till our swords clash together. I swear it by the
God you have denied, by the Blessed Lady you have blasphemed; I swear it
by the seven swords in her heart. I swear it by the Holy Island where my
fathers are, by the honour of my mother, by the secret of my people, and
by the chalice of the Blood of God."

The atheist drew up his head. "And I," he said, "give my word."

III. SOME OLD CURIOSITIES

The evening sky, a dome of solid gold, unflaked even by a single sunset
cloud, steeped the meanest sights of London in a strange and mellow
light. It made a little greasy street of St. Martin's Lane look as if it
were paved with gold. It made the pawnbroker's half-way down it shine as
if it were really that Mountain of Piety that the French poetic instinct
has named it; it made the mean pseudo-French bookshop, next but one to
it, a shop packed with dreary indecency, show for a moment a kind of
Parisian colour. And the shop that stood