“No; it is a matter of a good deal of importance,” she went on.  “I can see that you are going to be thrown into friendship, close contact, with Father Forbes.  He likes you, and you can’t help liking him.  There is nobody else in this raw, overgrown, empty-headed place for you and him to like, nobody except that man, that Dr. Ledsmar.  And if you like him, I shall hate you!  He has done mischief enough already.  I am counting on you to help undo it, and to choke him off from doing more.  It would be different if you were an ordinary Orthodox minister, all encased like a terrapin in prejudices and nonsense.  Of course, if you had been that kind, we should never have got to know you at all.  But when I saw you in MacEvoy’s cottage there, it was plain that you were one of us—­I mean a man, and not a marionette or a mummy.  I am talking very frankly to you, you see.  I want you on my side, against that doctor and his heartless, bloodless science.”

“I feel myself very heartily on your side,” replied Theron.  She had set their progress at a slower pace, now that the lights of the main street were drawing near, as if to prolong their talk.  All his earlier reservations had fled.  It was almost as if she were a parishioner of his own.  “I need hardly tell you that the doctor’s whole attitude toward—­toward revelation—­was deeply repugnant to me.  It doesn’t make it any the less hateful to call it science.  I am afraid, though,” he went on hesitatingly, “that there are difficulties in the way of my helping, as you call it.  You see, the very fact of my being a Methodist minister, and his being a Catholic priest, rather puts my interference out of the question.”

“No; that doesn’t matter a button,” said Celia, lightly.  “None of us think of that at all.”

“There is the other embarrassment, then,” pursued Theron, diffidently, “that Father Forbes is a vastly broader and deeper scholar—­in all these matters—­than I am.  How could I possibly hope to influence him by my poor arguments?  I don’t know even the alphabet of the language he thinks in—­on these subjects, I mean.”

“Of course you don’t!” interposed the girl, with a confidence which the other, for all his meekness, rather winced under.  “That wasn’t what I meant at all.  We don’t want arguments from our friends:  we want sympathies, sensibilities, emotional bonds.  The right person’s silence is worth more for companionship than the wisest talk in the world from anybody else.  It isn’t your mind that is needed here, or what you know; it is your heart, and what you feel.  You are full of poetry, of ideals, of generous, unselfish impulses.  You see the human, the warm-blooded side of things.  That is what is really valuable.  That is how you can help!”

“You overestimate me sadly,” protested Theron, though with considerable tolerance for her error in his tone.  “But you ought to tell me something about this Dr. Ledsmar.  He spoke of being an old friend of the pr—­of Father Forbes.”