“Come here, Bobbie, you reprobate!” cried Chide from a distance.  “Hold your tongue, and bring me the guide-book.”

Bobbie strolled off, laughing.

“Is it all a sham, then,” said Diana, looking round her with a smile and a sigh:  “St. Francis—­and the ’Fioretti’—­and the ‘Hymn to the Sun’?  Has it all ended in lazy monks—­and hypocrisy?”

“Dante asked himself the same question eighty years after St. Francis’s death.  Yet here is this divine church!”—­Ferrier pointed to the frescoed walls, the marvellous roof—­“here is immortal art!—­and here, in your mind and in mine, after six hundred years, is a memory—­an emotion—­which, but for St. Francis, had never been; by which indeed we judge his degenerate sons.  Is that not achievement enough—­for one child of man?”

“Six hundred years hence what modern will be as much alive as St. Francis is now?” Diana wondered, as they strolled on.

He turned a quiet gaze upon her.

“Darwin?  At least I throw it out.”

“Darwin!” Her voice showed doubt—­the natural demur of her young ignorance and idealism.

“Why not?  What faith was to the thirteenth century knowledge is to us.  St. Francis rekindled the heart of Europe, Darwin has transformed the main conception of the human mind.”

In the dark she caught the cheerful patience of the small penetrating eyes as they turned upon her.  And at the same time—­strangely—­she became aware of a sudden and painful impression; as though, through and behind the patience, she perceived an immense fatigue and discouragement—­an ebbing power of life—­in the man beside her.

“Hullo!” said Bobbie Forbes, turning back toward them, “I thought there was no one else here.”

For suddenly they had become aware of a tapping sound on the marble floor, and from the shadows of the eastern end there emerged two figures:  a woman in front, lame and walking with a stick, and a man behind.  The cold reflected light which filled the western half of the church shone full on both faces.  Bobbie Forbes and Diana exclaimed, simultaneously.  Then Diana sped along the pavement.

“Who?” said Chide, rejoining the other two.

“Frobisher—­and Miss Vincent,” said Forbes, studying the new-comers.

“Miss Vincent!” Chide’s voice showed his astonishment.  “I thought she had been very ill.”

“So she has,” said Ferrier—­“very ill.  It is amazing to see her here.”

“And Frobisher?”

Ferrier made no reply.  Chide’s expression showed perplexity, perhaps a shade of coldness.  In him a warm Irish heart was joined with great strictness, even prudishness of manners, the result of an Irish Catholic education of the old type.  Young women, in his opinion, could hardly be too careful, in a calumnious world.  The modern flouting of old decorums—­small or great—­found no supporter in the man who had passionately defended and absolved Juliet Sparling.