“Fear nothing of that sort,” answered Mannering.  “Your fellow-man has no right to judge you, and the law, with all its faults, appreciates logic.  Who can question your right to believe that this is a matter outside human knowledge?  Your wisdom may be questioned, but not your right.  Plenty would have felt the same.  When the mind of man finds itself groping in the dark, you will see that, in the huge majority of cases, it falls back upon supernatural explanations for mystery.  This fact has made fortunes for not a few who profit by the credulity of human nature.  Faiths are founded on it.  May carried too many guns for you.  He honestly convinced you that his theory of his son’s death was the correct theory; and I, for one, though I deplore the fact that you came to see with his eyes, and permitted him to do what he believed was his duty, yet should be the last to think your action open to judicial blame.  No Christian judge, at any rate, would have the least right to question you.  In a word, there is no case yet against anybody.  The force responsible for these things is utterly unknown, and if ill betides the men upstairs, that is only another argument for you.”

Sir Walter put down his book—­a volume of pious meditations.  Events had drawn him into a receptive attitude toward religion.  He was surprised at Dr. Mannering.

“I never thought to hear you admit as much as that.  How strangely the currents of the mind ebb and flow, Mannering.  Here are you with your scepticism apparently weakening, while I feel thankfully assured, at any rate for the moment, that only a material reason accounts for these disasters.”

“Why?” asked the physician.

“Because against the powers of any dark spirit Septimus May was safe.  Even had he been right and his prayer had freed such a being and cast it out of my house, would the Almighty have permitted it to rend and destroy the agent of its liberation?  May could not have suffered death by any conscious, supernatural means if our faith is true; but, as he himself said, when he came here after the death of his boy, he did not pretend that faith in God rendered a human being superior to the laws of matter.  If, as was suggested at dinner to-day, there is somebody in this house with a mind unhinged who has discovered a secret of nature by which human life can be destroyed and leave no sign, then this dead clergyman was, of course, as powerless against such a hideous danger as any other human being.”

“But surely such a theory is quite as wild as any based on supernatural assumptions?  You know the occupants of this house—­ every one of them, Sir Walter.  Mary knows them, Henry knows them.  I have attended most of them at one time or another.  Is there one against whom such a suspicion can be entertained?”

“Not one indeed.”

“Could the war have made a difference?” asked Mary.  “We know how shell shock and wounds to a poor man’s head had often left him apparently sound, yet in reality weakened as to his mind.”