“I say, M-m-marcella.  I’m sorry I said all those nasty things about your father.”

“There you are again, Louis!  Forget them all!  Forget everything but the future now.  I can’t imagine where I’ve got this conviction from, but it’s absolutely right, I know.  If you’ll wipe out all your memory and start clean, you’ll be cured.”

“I could never do as your father did—­all that religion business.”

“I don’t think I could, Louis.  Father saw God as a militant Captain, someone outside himself.  I’d never get thinking that about God.  But it seems to me, in your case, you want to find someone you could trust, someone who would take the responsibility from you.  Just as God did for father.  Even if we say there is no God at all, he thought there was and acted on his thought—­I suppose it’s when we feel weak as father did that we get the idea of God at all.”

“It all seems rot to me,” he told her.  “I laugh at God—­as a relic of fetishism.”

There was a long, hopeless silence.  At last he said dully: 

“There are some doctors—­our old Dean at St. Crispin’s, that I could throw myself upon as your father threw himself upon God.  But they’re not here.”

As she sat, frowning, trying most desperately to help him, finding her unready brain a blank thing like the desert, realizing that, in all her reading there was nothing that could help, since there was no strong helper in the world save that Strong Man God who had gripped her father’s imagination and could never grip Louis’s, a whole pageant of dreams passed before her; dreams, intangible ideas which she grasped eagerly—­visions—­she saw herself John the Baptist, “making straight the way of the Lord”—­she saw Siegfried, King Arthur—­and, with a heart-leaping gasp she asked herself, “Why should not I be Louis’s Deliverer?  Why should not I be God’s pathway to him?  Why should not I be Siegfried?” And all the time her brain, peopled with myths, saw only the shining armour, the glittering fight; she did not see the path of God deeply rutted by trampling feet, burnt by the blazing footsteps of God.  She heard herself as John’s great crying voice and heeded the prison and the martyrdom not at all:  it was a moment’s flash, a moment’s revelation.  Then she turned to him.  Her eyes were very bright.  She spoke rapidly, nervously.

“Louis—­that doctor you know—­the Dean.  Do you think they are the only wise folks on earth?  I mean, do you think wisdom begins and ends with wise people?  I don’t, you know.” she paused, frowning, not quite sure where this thought was going to lead her.

“They’re the best chaps on earth,” he murmured.  “I c-could have b-been like them.”

“But what is it makes them wise and fine?  It’s—­I think—­because they get rid of themselves, and let God shine through them to other people.”

He turned impatiently.  She caught his hot, damp, dirty hand in hers.