“No, Dr. Knowles.  Your scheme is but a sign of the mad age we live in.  Since the thirteenth century, when the anarchic element sprang full-grown into the history of humanity, that history has been chaos.  And this republic is the culmination of chaos.”

“Out of chaos came the new-born earth,” suggested the Doctor.

“But its foundations were granite,” rejoined the old man with nervous eagerness,—­“granite, not the slime of yesterday.  When you found empires, go to work as God worked.”

The Doctor did not answer; sat looking, instead, out into the dark indifferently, as if the heresies which the old man hurled at him were some old worn-out song.  Seeing, however, that the schoolmaster’s flush of enthusiasm seemed on the point of dying out, he roused himself to gibe it into life.

“Well, Mr. Howth, what will you have?  If the trodden rights of the human soul are the slime of yesterday, how shall we found our empire to last?  On despotism?  Civil or theocratic?”

“Any despotism is better than that of newly enfranchised serfs,” replied the schoolmaster.

The Doctor laughed.

“What a successful politician you would have made!  You would have had such a winning way to the hearts of the great unwashed!”

Mrs. Howth laid down her knitting.

“My dear,” she said, timidly, “I think that is treason.”

The angry heat died out of his face instantly, as he turned to her, without the glimmer of a covert smile at her simplicity.  She was a woman; and when he spoke to the Doctor, it was in a tone less sharp.

“What is it the boys used to declaim, their Yankee hearts throbbing under their roundabouts?  ‘Happy, proud America!’ Somehow in that way.  ‘Cursed, abased America!’ better if they had said.  Look at her, in the warm vigor of her youth, most vigorous in decay!  Look at the dregs of nations, creeds, religions, fermenting together!  As for the theory of self-government, it will muddle down here, as in the three great archetypes of the experiment, into a puling, miserable failure!”

The Doctor did not hear.  Some sharper shadow seemed to haunt him than the downfall of the Republic.  What help did he seek in this girl?  His keen, deep eyes never left her unconscious face.

“No,” Mr. Howth went on, having the field to himself,—­“we left Order back there in the ages you call dark, and Progress will trumpet the world into the ditch.”

“Comte!” growled the Doctor.

The schoolmaster’s cane beat an angry tattoo on the hearth.

“You sneer at Comte?  Because, having the clearest eye, the widest sweeping eye ever given to man, he had no more?  It was to show how far flesh can go alone.  Could he help it, if God refused the prophet’s vision?”

“I’m sure, Samuel,” interrupted his wife with a sorrowful earnestness, “your own eyes were as strong as a man’s could be.  It was ten years after I wore spectacles that you began.  Only for that miserable fever, you could read short-hand now.”