They were not a mile from where John had seen Kitty for a last time.  Now the mere recollection of her jarred his joy in the evening, for he had long since begun to understand that his love of her had been a kind of accident, even as her death a strange unaccountable divagation of his true nature.  He had grown ashamed of his passion, and he now thought that, like Parsifal, instead of yielding, he should have looked down and seen a cross in the sword’s hilt, and the temptation should have passed.  That cruel death, never explained, so mysterious and so involved in horror!  In what measure was he to blame?  In what light was he to view this strange death as a symbol, as a sign?  And if she had not been killed?  If he had married her?  To escape from these assaults of conscience he buried his mind in his books and writings, not in his history of Christian Latin, for now his history of those writers appeared to him sterile, and he congratulated himself that he had outgrown love of such paradoxes.

Solemn, and with the great curves of palms, the sky arched above them, and all the coombes filled with all the mystery of evening shadow, and all around lay the sea—­a rim of sea illimitable.

At the end of a long silence Mike spoke of his poem.

“You must have written a good deal of it by this time.”

“No, I have written very little;” and then yielding to his desire to astonish, confessed he was working at a trilogy on the life of Christ, and had already decided the main lines and incidents of the three plays.  His idea was the disintegration of the legend, which had united under a godhead certain socialistic aspirations then prevalent in Judaea.  In his first play, John, he introduces two reformers, one of whom is assassinated by John; the second perishes in a street broil, leaving the field free for the triumph of Jesus of Nazareth.  In the second play, Jesus, he tells the story of Jesus and the Magdalene.  She throws over her protector, one of the Rabbi, and refuses her admirer, Judas, for Jesus.  The Rabbi plots to destroy Jesus, and employs Judas.  In the third play, Peter, he pictures the struggle of the new idea in pagan Rome, and it ends in Peter flying from Rome to escape crucifixion; but outside the city he sees Christ carrying His cross, and Christ says He is going to be crucified a second time, whereupon Peter returns to Rome.

As they descended the rough chalk road into the weald, John said, “I have sacrificed much for my religion.  I think, therefore, I have a right to say that it is hard that my house should be selected for the manufacture of blasphemous trilogies.”

Knowing that argument would profit him nothing, Mike allayed John’s heaving conscience with promises not to write another line of the trilogy, and to devote himself entirely to his poem.  At the end of a long silence, John said—­

“Now the very name of Schopenhauer revolts me.  I accept nothing of his ideas.  From that ridiculous pessimism I have drifted very far indeed.  Pessimism is impossible.  To live we must have an ideal, and pessimism offers none.  So far it is inferior even to positivism.”