age.

III

Thee dusk was already fallen before Laurie, strolling vaguely in the
garden, heard the carriage wheels draw up at the gate outside.

He had ridden again alone, and his mind had run, to a certain extent,
as might be expected, upon the recent guest and her very startling
conversation. He was an intelligent young man, and he had not been in
the least taken in by her pseudo-mystical remarks. Yet there had been
something in her extreme assurance that had affected him, as a man may
smile sourly at a good story in bad taste. His attitude, in fact, was
that of most Christians under the circumstances. He did not, for an
instant, believe that such things really and literally happened, and
yet it was difficult to advance any absolutely conclusive argument
against them. Merely, they had not come his way; they appeared to
conflict with experience, and they usually found as their advocates
such persons as Mrs. Stapleton.

Two things, however, prevailed to keep the matter before his mind.
The first was his own sense of loss, his own experience, sore and hot
within him, of the unapproachable emptiness of death; the second,
Maggie's attitude. When a plainly sensible and controlled young woman
takes up a position of superiority, she is apt, unless the young man
in her company happens to be in love with her--and sometimes even when
he is--to provoke and irritate him into a camp of opposition. She is
still more apt to do so if her relations to him have once been in the
line of even greater tenderness.

Laurie then was not in the most favorable of moods to receive the
dicta of the Vicar.

They were announced to him immediately after Mrs. Baxter had received
from Maggie's hands her first cup of tea.

"Mr. Rymer tells me it's all nonsense," she said.

Laurie looked up.

"What?" he said.

"Mr. Rymer tells me Spiritualism is all nonsense. He told me about
someone called Eglingham, who kept a beard in his portmanteau."

"Eglinton, I think, auntie," put in Maggie.

"I daresay, my dear. Anyhow, it's all the same. I felt sure it must be
so." Laurie took a bun, with a thoughtful air.

"Does Mr. Rymer know very much about it, do you think, mother?"

"Dear boy, I think he knows all that anyone need know. Besides, if you
come to think of it, how could Cardinal Newman possibly appear in a
drawing-room? Particularly when Mrs. Stapleton says he isn't a
Christian any longer."

This had a possible and rather pleasing double