“Because I am armed, Mary, and they were defenseless.  Unhappily youth is seldom clothed in the whole armor of righteousness.  My dear son was a good and honorable man, but he was not a religious man.  He had yet to learn the incomparable and vital value of the practice of Christian faith.  Hardcastle invited his own doom.  He admitted—­he even appeared to pride himself upon a crude and pagan rationalism.  It is not surprising that such a man should be called away to learn the lessons of which he stood so gravely in need.”

“I know that our dear Tom was bidden to higher work—­to labor in a higher cause than here, to purer knowledge of those things that matter most to the human soul,” said Mary.  “But that is not to say God chose to take him by a miracle.  For what you believe amounts to a miracle.  You know that I am bearing my loss in the same spirit as yourself, but, granted it had to be at God’s will, that is no reason why we should suppose the means employed were outside nature.”

“How can you pretend they are inside nature, as we know it?” asked her father.

“We know nothing at all yet, and I implore Mr. May to wait until we are at least assured that science cannot find a reason.”

“Fear not for me, my child,” answered Septimus May.  “You forget certain details that have assisted to decide me.  Remember that Hardcastle had openly denied and derided the possibility of supernatural peril.  He had challenged this potent thing not an hour before he was brought face to face with it.  Tom went to his death innocently; this man cannot be absolved so easily.  In my case, with my knowledge and faith, the conditions are very different, and I oppose an impregnable barrier between myself and the secret being.  I am an old priest, and I go knowing the nature of my task.  My weapons are such that a good spirit would applaud them and an evil spirit be powerless against them.  Do you not see that the Almighty could never permit one of His creatures—­for even the devils also are His—­to defeat His own minister or trample on the name of Christ?  It would amount to that.  So armed one might walk in safety through the lowermost hell, for hell can only believe and tremble before the truth.”

Mary looked hopelessly at her father; but he offered her small comfort.  Sir Walter still found himself conforming to the fierce piety and dogmatic assurance of the man of God.  In this welter and upheaval his modest intellect found only a foothold here, and his judgment now firmly inclined to the confident assertions of religion.  He was himself a devout and conventional believer, and he turned to the support of faith, and shared, with increasing conviction, the opinion of Septimus May, as uttered in a volume of confident words.  He became blind to the physical danger.  He even showed a measure of annoyance at Mary’s obstinate entreaties.  She strove to calm him, and told him he was not himself—­an assertion that, by his inner consciousness of its truth, seemed to incense Sir Walter.