He expressed just what they came to now by a gesture.

She echoed his gesture.

“Probably I’m not alone among my brethren,” he went on, and then:  “But what is one to do?”

With her hands she acted her sense of his difficulty.

“One may be precipitate,” he said.  “There’s a kind of loyalty and discipline that requires one to keep the ranks until one’s course of action is perfectly clear.  One owes so much to so many.  One has to consider how one may affect—­oh! people one has never seen.”

He was lugging things now into speech that so far had been scarcely above the threshold of his conscious thought.  He went on to discuss the entire position of the disbelieving cleric.  He discovered a fine point.

“If there was something else, an alternative, another religion, another Church, to which one could go, the whole case would be different.  But to go from the church to nothingness isn’t to go from falsehood to truth.  It’s to go from truth, rather badly expressed, rather conservatively hidden by its protections, truth in an antiquated costume, to the blackest lie—­in the world.”

She took that point very brightly.

“One must hold fast to ’iligion,” she said, and looked earnestly at him and gripped fiercely, pink thumbs out, with her beautiful hands held up.

That was it, exactly.  He too was gripping.  But while on the outside the Midianites of denial were prowling for these clinging souls, within the camp they were assailed by a meticulous orthodoxy that was only too eager to cast them forth.  The bishop dwelt for a time upon the curious fierceness orthodoxy would sometimes display.  Nowadays atheism can be civil, can be generous; it is orthodoxy that trails a scurrilous fringe.

“Who was that young man with a strong Irish accent—­who contradicted me so suddenly?” he asked.

“The dark young man?”

“The noisy young man.”

“That was Mist’ Pat’ick O’Go’man.  He is a Kelt and all that.  Spells Pat’ick with eva so many letters.  You know.  They say he spends ouas and ouas lea’ning E’se.  He wo’ies about it.  They all t’y to lea’n E’se, and it wo’ies them and makes them hate England moa and moa.”

“He is orthodox.  He—­is what I call orthodox to the ridiculous extent.”

“’idiculous.”

A deep-toned gong proclaimed breakfast over a square mile or so of territory, and Lady Sunderbund turned about mechanically towards the house.  But they continued their discussion.

She started indeed a new topic.  “Shall we eva, do ’ou think, have a new ’iligion—­t’ua and betta?”

That was a revolutionary idea to him.

He was still fending it off from him when a gap in the shrubs brought them within sight of the house and of Mrs. Garstein Fellows on the portico waving a handkerchief and crying “Break-fast.”

“I wish we could talk for houas,” said Lady Sunderbund.