ary's parishioners."

Fay explained. "Dr. Hilary married us, but we haven't troubled the
church much since. I never took any interest in the Christian religion
to begin with; and when I looked into it I found it even more fallacious
than I supposed." To account for this advanced position on the part of a
simple market-gardener he added, "I've been a good deal of a reader."

Thor spoke slowly and after meditation. "It isn't so much a question of
its being fallacious as of its capacity for producing results."

Fay turned partially round toward the south, where a haze hung above the
city. His tone was infused with a mild bitterness. "Don't we see the
results it can produce--over there?"

"That's right, too." Thor was so much in sympathy with this point of
view that he hardly knew how to go on. "And yet some of us doctors are
beginning to suspect that there may be a power in Christianity--a purely
psychological power, you understand--that hasn't been used for what it's
worth."

Fay nodded. He had been following this current of contemporary thought.
"Yes, Dr. Thor. So I hear. Just as, I dare say, you haven't found out
all the uses of opium."

"Well, opium is good in its place, you know."

"I suppose so." He lifted his starry eyes with their mystic, visionary
rapture fully on the young physician. "And yet I remember how George
Eliot prayed that when her troubles came she might get along without
being drugged by that stuff--meaning the Christian religion, sir--and I
guess I'd kind o' like that me and mine should do the same."

Thor dropped the subject and went his way. As far as he had opinions of
his own, they would have been similar to Fay's had he not within a year
or two heard of sufficiently authenticated cases in which sick spirits
or disordered nerves had yielded to spiritual counsels after the doctor
had had no success. He had been so little impressed with these instances
that he might not have allowed his speculations with regard to Mrs. Fay
to go beyond the fleeting thought, only for the fact that on passing
through the Square he met Reuben Hilary. In general he was content to
touch his hat to the old gentleman and go on; but to-day, urged by an
impulse too vague to take accurate account of, he stopped with
respectful greetings.

"I've just been to see an old parishioner of yours, sir," he said, when
the preliminaries of neighborly conversation had received their due.

"Have you, now?" was the non-committa