How he found his way back to his room, walking thus in a maze, he never could recall.  As the door clicked and he turned towards the fireplace, his eye fell upon a brown-paper parcel lying on the table.  John Arniston opened it out in an absent way, his mind and fancy still abiding by the low chair in Miriam’s room.  What he saw smote him suddenly pale.  He laid his hand on the mantelpiece to keep from falling.  It was nothing more than a plain, thick quarto volume, covered with a worn overcoat of undressed calf-skin.  At the angle of the back and on one side the rough hair was worn thin, and the skin showed through.  His mother had done that, reaching it down for his father to “take the book"[2] in the old house at home.  John Arniston sat down on the easy-chair with the half-unwrapped parcel on his knee.  His eye read the pages without a letter printing itself on his retina.  It was a book within a book, and without also, which he read.  He read the tale of the smooth places on the side.  No one in the world but himself could know what he read.  He saw this book, his father’s great house Bible, lying above a certain grey head, in the white square hole in the wall.  Beneath it was a copy of the Drumfern Standard, and on the top a psalm-book in which were his mother’s spectacles, put there when she took them off after reading her afternoon portion.

[Footnote 2:  Engage in family worship.]

He opened the book at random:  “And God spake all these words saying ...  THOU SHALT NOT—­” The tremendous sentence smote him fairly on the face.  He threw his head violently back so that he might not read any further.  The book slipped between his knees and fell heavily on the floor.

But the words which had caught his eye, “THOU SHALT NOT—­” were printed in fire on the ceiling, or on his brain—­he did not know which.  He got up quickly, put on his hat, and went out again into the bitter night.  He turned down to the left and paced the Thames Embankment.  The fog was thicker than ever.  Unseen watercraft with horns and steam-roarers grunted like hogs in the river.  But in John Arniston’s brain there was a conflict of terrible passion.

After all, it was but folklore, he said to himself.  Nothing more than that.  Every one knew it.  All intelligent people were nowadays of one religion.  The thing was manifestly absurd—­the Hebrew fetich was dead—­dead as Mumbo Jumbo.  “Thank God!” he added inconsequently.  He walked faster and faster, and on more than one occasion he brushed hurriedly against some of the brutal frequenters of that part of the world on foggy evenings.  A rough lout growled belligerently at him, but shrank from the gladsome light of battle which leaped instantly into John Arniston’s eye.  To strike some one would have been a comfort to him at that moment.

Well, it was done with.  The effete morality of a printed book was no tie upon him.  The New Freedom was his—­the freedom to do as he would and possess what he desired.  Yet after all it was an old religion, this of John’s.  It has had many names; but it has never wanted priests to preach and devotees to practise its very agreeable tenets.