It was an afternoon of June, languid and fragrant; the declining sun was in their faces as they went in company under the high arches of the elms, in a queer contrast of costume and personality.  Carrick, the man of science, the adventurer in the bypaths of knowledge, affronted the Sabbath in the clothes which gave offence to the curate.  He was a thin, impatient man, standing on the brink of middle age, with the hard, intent face of one accustomed to verify the evidence of his own senses.  A habit he had of doing his thinking in the open air had left him tanned and limber; he walked easily, with the light foot of an athlete, while Mr. Newman, decorous in the black clothes which are the uniform of the regular churchgoer, trod deliberately at his side and mopped his brow with a handkerchief.

“It was very warm in the church this afternoon,” explained Mr. Newman mildly.  “Very warm.”

He was an older man than Carrick, and altogether a riper and most complacent figure.  He had a large and benevolent face, which would have been common-place but for a touch of steadfastness and serenity which dignified it, and an occasional vivacity of the kindly eyes.  One perceived in him a man who had come smoothly through life, secure in plain faiths and clear hopes, unafraid of destiny.  Something reverend in his general effect accentuated his difference from his companion.

“Ventilation,” Carrick was saying.  “On an afternoon like this you might as well shut those children up in a family vault.  Twenty of them, all breathing carbonic acid gas, besides yourself—­and that ass!”

“You mean the curate?” inquired Mr. Newman.  “Really, he isn’t an ass.  He didn’t like your clothes—­that was all.”

“What’s the matter with ’em?” demanded Carrick, inspecting his shabby sleeve.  “You don’t want me to dress up like—­like you, do you?”

“My dear fellow!” Mr. Newman smiled protestingly, lifting a suave hand.  “I don’t care how you dress.  I don’t want you to ’make broad your phylacteries,’ you know.”

Carrick snorted, and they walked in silence through the little village that lay below the church.

The matter they had in common, which bridged their diversity and made it possible for them to be, after their fashion, friends, was their interest in the subject which Carrick had made his own—­experimental psychology.  Like all successful business men, Mr. Newman had an unschooled aptitude for the science, and had practised it with profit on his competitors and employees before he knew a word of its technology.  In Carrick’s bare and lamp-lit study they had joined forces to bewilder and undermine the intelligence of the sly spaniel, and there had been sessions of hypnotism, with Mr. Newman rigid in trances, while Carrick groped, as it were, among the springs of his mind.  The pair of them had incurred the indignation of European authorities, writing in obscure and costly little journals whose names the general public never heard.  The bond of martyrdom—­ martyrdom in print—­united them.