“Oh, yes, they’ve always known each other; that is, for many years.  They were professors together in a college once, heaven only knows how long ago.  Then they separated, I fancy they quarrelled, too, before they parted.  The doctor came here, where some relative had left him the place he lives in.  Then in time the Bishop chanced to send Father Forbes here—­that was about three years ago,—­and the two men after a while renewed their old relations.  They dine together; that is the doctor’s stronghold.  He knows more about eating than any other man alive, I believe.  He studies it as you would study a language.  He has taught old Maggie, at the pastorate there, to cook like the mother of all the Delmonicos.  And while they sit and stuff themselves, or loll about afterward like gorged snakes, they think it is smart to laugh at all the sweet and beautiful things in life, and to sneer at people who believe in ideals, and to talk about mankind being merely a fortuitous product of fermentation, and twaddle of that sort.  It makes me sick!”

“I can readily see,” said Theron, with sympathy, “how such a cold, material, and infidel influence as that must shock and revolt an essentially religious temperament like yours.”

Miss Madden looked up at him.  They had turned into the main street, and there was light enough for him to detect something startlingly like a grin on her beautiful face.

“But I’m not religious at all, you know,” he heard her say.  “I’m as Pagan as—­anything!  Of course there are forms to be observed, and so on; I rather like them than otherwise.  I can make them serve very well for my own system; for I am myself, you know, an out-an-out Greek.”

“Why, I had supposed that you were full blooded Irish,” the Rev. Mr. Ware found himself remarking, and then on the instant was overwhelmed by the consciousness that he had said a foolish thing.  Precisely where the folly lay he did not know, but it was impossible to mistake the gesture of annoyance which his companion had instinctively made at his words.  She had widened the distance between them now, and quickened her step.  They went on in silence till they were within a block of her house.  Several people had passed them who Theron felt sure must have recognized them both.

“What I meant was,” the girl all at once began, drawing nearer again, and speaking with patient slowness, “that I find myself much more in sympathy with the Greek thought, the Greek theology of the beautiful and the strong, the Greek philosophy of life, and all that, than what is taught nowadays.  Personally, I take much more stock in Plato than I do in Peter.  But of course it is a wholly personal affair; I had no business to bother you with it.  And for that matter, I oughtn’t to have troubled you with any of our—­”

“I assure you, Miss Madden!” the young minister began, with fervor.

“No,” she broke in, in a resigned and even downcast tone; “let it all be as if I hadn’t spoken.  Don’t mind anything I have said.  If it is to be, it will be.  You can’t say more than that, can you?”