“What I can’t yet quite understand,” said Monsignor, “is that point I mentioned the other day about Faith and Science.  I don’t see where one ends and the other begins.  It seems to me that the controversy must be unending.  The materialist says that since Nature does all things, even the most amazing things must be done by her—­that we shall be able to explain them all some day, when Science has got a little farther.  And the theologian says that some things are so evidently out of the reach of Nature that they must be done by a supernatural power.  Well, where’s the point of reconciliation?”

Father Jervis was silent for a while.

* * * * *

The two were sitting on the upper deck of an air-ship towards evening, travelling straight towards the setting sun.

He had grown almost accustomed to such views by now; and yet the sight that had been unrolling itself gradually during the last half-hour had held him fascinated for minute after minute.  They had taken ship in Rome after a day or two more of sight-seeing, and had moved up the peninsula by stages, changing boats soon after crossing the frontier, for one of the high-flying, more leisurely and more luxurious vessels on which the more wealthy classes travelled.  They were due in Lourdes that evening; and, ever since the higher peaks of the Pyrenees had come into sight, had moved over a vision of bewildering beauty.  To their left rose the mountains, forming, it seemed to them at the height at which they travelled, an enormous jagged and gigantic pile, hard-lined as steel, yet irradiated with long rays, patches, and pools of golden sunset-light alternated by amazing depths of the shadow whose tones ran from peacock to indigo.  Then from the feet of the tumbled pile there ran out what appeared a loosely flung carpet vivid and yet a soft green, patched here and there with white towns, embroideries of woodland, lines of silver water.  Yet this too was changing as they watched the shadows grow longer with almost visible movement.  New and strange colours, varying about a fixed note of blue according to the nature of that with which the earth was covered, slowly came into being.  Here, in front, now and again a patch of water glowed suddenly, three thousand feet beneath, as it met the shifting angle between the eye and the sun; and beyond, far out across the darkening plain, shone the remote line of the sea, itself ablaze with gold, and above and about in every quarter burned the enormous luminous dome of sky.

* * * * *

“I can’t put it all accurately,” said Father Jervis at last.  “I mean I can’t tell you off-hand all the tests that are exactly applied to every case.  But it’s something like this. . . .”

He paused.

“Yes, tell me,” said the other, still staring out at the softly rolling landscape.