“No, no, my dear Mrs. Molyneux; pardon me, but the sooner we get rid of all this sort of rubbish the better.  It is the indulgence they have given to such feelings that has made all the religions such a curse to the world.  I don’t believe, to begin with, that they are universal.  I never experienced any such cravings and yearnings except when I was out of sorts; and I never met a thoroughly happy or healthy person who did.  If people keep their bodies in good order and their minds well employed, they have no time for yearnings.  It was bad enough when there was some pretext for them; when we imagined there was a God and a world which was better than this one.  But now we know there is not the slightest ground for supposing anything of the kind, we had better have the courage of our opinions, and live up to them, or down to them.  As to the word ‘ideal,’ it ought to be expunged from the vocabulary; I would like to make it penal to pronounce, or write, or print the word for a century.  Why, we have been surfeited with the ideal by the Christian Churches; that’s why we find the real so little to our taste.  We’ve been so long fed upon sweet trash, we can’t relish wholesome food.  The cure for that is to take wholesome food or starve, not provide another sickly substitute.  Pray, let us have no more religions.  On the contrary, our first duty is to be as irreligious as possible—­to believe in as little as we can, to trust in nobody but ourselves, to hope for nothing but the actual, to get rid of all high-flown notions of human beings and their destiny, and, above all, to avoid as poison the ideal, the sublime, the—­”

His words were drowned at last in musical cries of indignation from Mrs. Molyneux.  I remember no more of the discussion, except that Atherley continued to reiterate his doctrine in different words, and Mrs. Molyneux to denounce it with unabated fervour.

My thoughts wandered—­I heard no more.  I was tired and depressed, and felt grateful to Lady Atherley when, with invariable punctuality, at a quarter to eleven, she interrupted the symposium by rising and proposing that we should all go to bed.

My last distinct recollection of that evening is of Mrs. Molyneux, with the folds of her gown in one hand, and a bedroom candlestick in the other, mounting the dark oak stairs, and calling out fervently as she went—­

“Oh, how I pray that I may see the ghost!”

The night was stormy, and I could not sleep.  The wind wailed fitfully outside the house, while within doors and windows rattled, and on the stairs and in the passages wandered strange and unaccountable noises, like stealthy footsteps or stifled voices.  To this dreary accompaniment, as I lay awake in the darkness, I heard the lessons of the last few days repeated:  witness after witness rose and gave his varying testimony; and when, before the discord and irony of it all, I bitterly repeated Pilate’s question, the smile on that dead face would rise before me, and then I hoped again.