With Gratian it was different.  He knew that an encounter was before him; a struggle between him and her husband—­for characteristically he set the change in her, the defection of her faith, down to George, not to spontaneous thought and feeling in herself.  He dreaded and yet looked forward to this encounter.  It came on the third day, when Laird was up, lying on that very sofa where Pierson had sat listening to Gratian’s confession of disbelief.  Except for putting in his head to say good morning, he had not yet seen his son-in-law:  The young doctor could not look fragile, the build of his face, with that law and those heavy cheekbones was too much against it, but there was about him enough of the look of having come through a hard fight to give Pierson’s heart a squeeze.

“Well, George,” he said, “you gave us a dreadful fright!  I thank God’s mercy.”  With that half-mechanical phrase he had flung an unconscious challenge.  Laird looked up whimsically.

“So you really think God merciful, sir?”

“Don’t let us argue, George; you’re not strong enough.”

“Oh!  I’m pining for something to bite on.”

Pierson looked at Gratian, and said softly: 

“God’s mercy is infinite, and you know it is.”

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.”