“Exactly,” laughed Holmes, putting his hand on his head.  “Crippled there by my Yorkshire blood,—­my mother.  Never mind; outside of this life, blood or circumstance matters nothing.”

They walked on slowly towards town.  Surely there was nothing in the bill-of-sale which the old man had in his pocket but a mere matter of business; yet they were strangely silent about it, as if it brought shame to some one.  There was an embarrassed pause.  The Doctor went back to Lois for relief.

“I think it is the pain and want of such as she that makes them susceptible to religion.  The self in them is so starved and humbled that it cannot obscure their eyes; they see God clearly.”

“Say rather,” said Holmes, “that the soul is so starved and blind that it cannot recognize itself as God.”

The Doctor’s intolerant eye kindled.

“Humph!  So that’s your creed!  Not Pantheism. Ego sum.  Of course you go on with the conjugation:  I have been, I shall be.  I,—­that covers the whole ground, creation, redemption, and commands the hereafter?”

“It does so,” said Holmes, coolly.

“And this wretched huckster carries her deity about her,—­her self-existent soul?  How, in God’s name, is her life to set it free?”

Holmes said nothing.  The coarse sneer could not be answered.  Men with pale faces and heavy jaws like his do not carry their religion on their tongue’s end; their creeds leave them only in the slow oozing life-blood, false as the creeds may be.

Knowles went on hotly, half to himself, seizing on the new idea fiercely, as men and women do who are yet groping for the truth of life.

“What is it your Novalis says?  ‘The true Shechinah is man.’  You know no higher God?  Pooh! the idea is old enough; it began with Eve.  It works slowly, Holmes.  In six thousand years, taking humanity as one, this self-existent soul should have clothed itself with a freer, royaller garment than poor Lois’s body,—­or mine,” he added, bitterly.

“It works slowly,” said the other, quietly.  “Faster soon, in America.  There are yet many ills of life for the divinity within to conquer.”

“And Lois and the swarming mass yonder in those dens?  It is late for them to begin the fight?”

“Endurance is enough for them here.  Their religions teach them that they could not bear the truth.  One does not put a weapon into the hands of a man dying of the fetor and hunger of the siege.”

“But what will this life, or the lives to come, give to you champions who know the truth?”

“Nothing but victory,” he said, in a low tone, looking away.

Knowles looked at the pale strength of the iron face.

“God help you, Stephen!” he broke out, his shallow jeering falling off.  “For there is a God higher than we.  The ills of life you mean to conquer will teach it to you, Holmes.  You’ll find the Something above yourself, if it’s only to curse Him and die.”