It was the face of Nancy, for the first time all its guards down.  Full upon him flamed the illumined eyes that made the face a yielding radiance; lifted a little was the chin of gentle curves, the under lip caught as if in that quivering eagerness she no longer breathed—­the face of Nancy, no longer wondering, Nancy at last compelled and compelling.  A moment the warm light flashed from each to each.

He stopped in a sudden bewilderment, looking blankly, questioningly at the faces about him.  Then out of the first chaos came the sense of having awakened from some long, quiet sleep—­of having suddenly opened his eyes upon a world from which the morning mists had lifted, to see himself—­and the woman who stood always at the end of that upward path—­face to face for the first time.  One by one his outer sensations returned.  At first he heard a blurred murmuring, then he became aware that some of the men were looking at him curiously, that one of them had addressed him.  He smiled apologetically.

“I beg your pardon.  I—­I couldn’t have been listening.”

“I merely asked,” repeated Floud, “how you expect to satisfy humanity with the vague hope that you would substitute for the Christian promise of eternal life.”

He stared stupidly at the questioner.

“I—­I don’t know.”  He passed a hand slowly upward over his forehead.  “Really I can hardly trouble about those matters—­there’s so much life to live.  I think I knew a moment ago, but I seem to have forgotten, though it’s doubtless no great loss.  I dare say it’s more important to be unafraid of life than to be unafraid of death.”

“You were full of reasons a moment ago,” reminded Whittaker—­“some of them not uninteresting.”

“Was I?  Oh, well, it’s a small matter—­I’ve somehow lost hold of it.”  He laughed awkwardly.  “It seems to have come to me just now that those who study an apple until it falls from its stem and rots are even more foolish than those who pluck and eat.”

Again he was silent, with a great hidden impatience for them to be gone.  But Whittaker, the wicked Unitarian, detained them still a moment longer.

“How hardly we should believe in a God who saved every one!” he breathed softly to the remains of his cigar.

“Humph!  Such a God would be a mere mush of concession!” retorted Floud, the Baptist.

“And how true,” pursued the unruffled Unitarian, “that we cannot worship a ’mere mush of concession’—­how true that our God must hate what we hate, and punish what we would punish.  We might stomach a God who would save orthodox burglars along with orthodox bishops, but not one who saved unbaptised infants and adults of unsound doctrine.  Dear, dear, yes!  We must have a God with a little human spite in Him or He seems to be spineless.”

“A hopeless cynic,” declared the soft voice of the Catholic—­“it’s the Unitarianism working out of him, mind you!”