Laird also looked at Gratian, before he answered: 

“God’s mercy is surely the amount of mercy man has succeeded in arriving at.  How much that is, this war tells you, sir.”

Pierson flushed.  “I don’t follow you,” he said painfully.  “How can you say such things, when you yourself are only just No; I refuse to argue, George; I refuse.”

Laird stretched out his hand to his wife, who came to him, and stood clasping it with her own.  “Well, I’m going to argue,” he said; “I’m simply bursting with it.  I challenge you, sir, to show me where there’s any sign of altruistic pity, except in man.  Mother love doesn’t count—­mother and child are too much one.”

The curious smile had come already, on both their faces.

“My dear George, is not man the highest work of God, and mercy the highest quality in man?”

“Not a bit.  If geological time be taken as twenty-four hours, man’s existence on earth so far equals just two seconds of it; after a few more seconds, when man has been frozen off the earth, geological time will stretch for as long again, before the earth bumps into something, and becomes nebula once more.  God’s hands haven’t been particularly full, sir, have they—­two seconds out of twenty-four hours—­if man is His pet concern?  And as to mercy being the highest quality in, man, that’s only a modern fashion of talking.  Man’s highest quality is the sense of proportion, for that’s what keeps him alive; and mercy, logically pursued, would kill him off.  It’s a sort of a luxury or by-product.”

“George!  You can have no music in your soul!  Science is such a little thing, if you could only see.”

“Show me a bigger, sir.”

“Faith.”

“In what?”

“In what has been revealed to us.”

“Ah!  There it is again!  By whom—­how?

“By God Himself—­through our Lord.”

A faint flush rose in Laird’s yellow face, and his eyes brightened.

“Christ,” he said; “if He existed, which some people, as you know, doubt, was a very beautiful character; there have been others.  But to ask us to believe in His supernaturalness or divinity at this time of day is to ask us to walk through the world blindfold.  And that’s what you do, don’t you?”

Again Pierson looked at his daughter’s face.  She was standing quite still, with her eyes fixed on her husband.  Somehow he was aware that all these words of the sick man’s were for her benefit.  Anger, and a sort of despair rose within him, and he said painfully: 

“I cannot explain.  There are things that I can’t make clear, because you are wilfully blind to all that I believe in.  For what do you imagine we are fighting this great war, if it is not to reestablish the belief in love as the guiding principle of life?”

Laird shook his head.  “We are fighting to redress a balance, which was in danger of being lost.”