of his family.  Only this chapel adventure seemed likely to restore those fallen and bedraggled fortunes.  He had not anticipated a tithe of the dire quality of that change.  They were not simply uncomfortable in the Notting Hill home.  They were miserable.  He fancied they looked to him with something between reproach and urgency.  Why had he brought them here?  What next did he propose to do?  He wished at times they would say it out instead of merely looking it.  Phoebe’s failing appetite chilled his heart.

That concern for his family, he believed, had been his chief motive in clinging to Lady Sunderbund’s projects long after he had realized how little they would forward the true service of God.  No doubt there had been moments of flattery, moments of something, something rather in the nature of an excited affection; some touch of the magnificent in her, some touch of the infantile,—­both appealed magnetically to his imagination; but the real effective cause was his habitual solicitude for his wife and children and his consequent desire to prosper materially.  As his first dream of being something between Mohammed and Peter the Hermit in a new proclamation of God to the world lost colour and life in his mind, he realized more and more clearly that there was no way of living in a state of material prosperity and at the same time in a state of active service to God.  The Church of the One True God (by favour of Lady Sunderbund) was a gaily-coloured lure.

And yet he wanted to go on with it.  All his imagination and intelligence was busy now with the possibility of in some way subjugating Lady Sunderbund, and modifying her and qualifying her to an endurable proposition.  Why?

Why?

There could be but one answer, he thought.  Brought to the test of action, he did not really believe in God!  He did not believe in God as he believed in his family.  He did not believe in the reality of either his first or his second vision; they had been dreams, autogenous revelations, exaltations of his own imaginations.  These beliefs were upon different grades of reality.  Put to the test, his faith in God gave way; a sword of plaster against a reality of steel.

And yet he did believe in God.  He was as persuaded that there was a God as he was that there was another side to the moon.  His intellectual conviction was complete.  Only, beside the living, breathing—­occasionally coughing—­reality of Phoebe, God was something as unsubstantial as the Binomial Theorem....

Very like the Binomial Theorem as one thought over that comparison.

By this time he had reached the banks of the Serpentine and was approaching the grey stone bridge that crosses just where Hyde Park ends and Kensington Gardens begins.  Following upon his doubts of his religious faith had come another still more extraordinary question:  “Although there is a God, does he indeed matter more in our ordinary lives than that same demonstrable Binomial Theorem?  Isn’t one’s duty to Phoebe plain and clear?” Old Likeman’s argument came back to him with novel and enhanced powers.  Wasn’t he after all selfishly putting his own salvation in front of his plain duty to those about him?  What did it matter if he told lies, taught a false faith, perjured and damned himself, if after all those others were thereby saved and comforted?