“Curious, indeed, and most revolting,” assented the old man, laying down his paper.  “You are feeling more cheerful, aren’t you—­and you look so much brighter.  Ah, what a mercy of God’s you were spared to me!—­you know you became my walking-stick when you were a very little boy—­I could hardly go far without you now, my son.”

“Yes, sir—­thank you—­I’ve just been recalling some of the older religions—­Nancy and I had quite a talk about the old Christian faith.”

“I’m glad indeed.  I had sometimes been led to suspect that Nancy was the least bit—­well, frivolous—­but I am an old man, and doubtless the things that seem best to me are those I see afar off, their colour subdued through the years.”

“Nancy wasn’t a bit frivolous this morning—­on the contrary, she seemed for some reason to consider me the frivolous one.  She looked shocked at me more than once.  Now, about the old Christian faith, you know—­their god was content with one sacrifice, instead of one each year, though he insisted on having the body eaten and the blood drunk perpetually.  Yet I suppose, sir, that the Christian god, in this limiting of the human sacrifice to one person, may be said to show a distinct advance over the god of the Bakairi, though he seems to have been equally a tribal god, whose chief function it was to make war upon neighbouring tribes.”

“Yes, my boy—­quite so,” replied the old man most soothingly.  He stepped gently to the door.  Halfway down the hall Allan was about to turn into his room.  He came, beckoned by the old man, who said, in tones too low for Bernal to hear: 

“Go quickly for Dr. Merritt.  He’s out of his head again.”

CHAPTER II

FURTHER DISTRESSING FANTASIES OF A CLOUDED MIND

When young Dr. Merritt came, flushed and important-looking, greatly concerned by the reported relapse, he found his patient with normal pulse and temperature—­rational and joyous at his discovery that the secret of reading Roman letters was still his.

“I was almost afraid to test it, Doctor,” he confessed, smilingly, when the little thermometer had been taken from between his lips, “but it’s all right—­I didn’t find a single strange letter—­every last one of them meant something—­and I know figures, too—­and now I’m as hungry for print as I am for baked potatoes.  You know, never in my life again, after I’m my own master, shall I neglect to eat the skin of my baked potato.  When I think of those I let go in my careless days of plenty, I grow heart-sick.”

“A little at a time, young man.  If they let you gorge as you’d like to there would be no more use sending for me; you’d be a goner—­that’s what you’d be!  Head feel all right?”

“Fine!—­I’ve settled down to a pleasant reading of Holy Writ.  This Old Testament is mighty interesting to me, though doubtless I’ve read it all before.”