When he passed out into the sunny street, he stood for an instant with a hand veiling his eyes, as if the sudden light were too strong.  Then he looked hither and thither with absent gaze, and at length bent his steps in the direction of Westminster Bridge.  On the south side of the river he descended the stairs to the Albert Embankment and walked along by St. Thomas’s Hospital.

Presently he overtook a man who was reading as he walked, a second book being held under his arm.  It was a young workman of three- or four-and-twenty, tall, of wiry frame, square-shouldered, upright.  Grail grasped his shoulder in a friendly way, asking: 

‘What now?’

‘Well, it’s tempted eighteenpence out of my pocket,’ was the other’s reply, as he gave the volume to be examined.  ’I’ve wanted a book on electricity for some time.’

He spoke with a slight North of England accent.  His name was Luke Ackroyd; he had come to London as a lad, and was now a work-fellow of Grail’s.  There was rough comeliness in his face and plenty of intelligence, something at the same time not quite satisfactory if one looked for strength of character; he smiled readily and had eyes which told of quick but unsteady thought; a mouth, too, which expressed a good deal of self-will and probably a strain of sensuality.  His manner was hearty, his look frank to a fault and full of sensibility.

‘I found it at the shop by Westminster Bridge,’ he continued.  ’You ought to go and have a look there to-night.  I saw one or two things pretty cheap that I thought were in your way.’

‘What’s the other?’ Grail inquired, returning the work on electricity, which he had glanced through without show of much interest.

‘Oh, this belongs to Jo Bunce,’ Ackroyd replied, laughing.  ’He’s just lent it me.’

It was a collection of antitheistic discourses; the titles, which were startling to the eye, sufficiently indicated the scope and quality of the matter.  Grail found even less satisfaction in this than in the other volume.

‘A man must have a good deal of time to spare,’ he said, with a smile, ‘if he spends it on stuff of that kind.’

’Oh, I don’t know about that.  You don’t need it, but there’s plenty of people that do.’

‘And that’s the kind of thing Bunce gives his children to read, eh?’

’Yes; he’s bringing them up on it.  He’s made them learn a secularist’s creed, and hears them say it every night.’

‘Well, I’m old-fashioned in such matters,’ said Grail, not caring to pursue the discussion.  ’I’d a good deal rather hear children say the ordinary prayer.’

Ackroyd laughed.

‘Have you heard any talk,’ he asked presently, ’about lectures by a Mr. Egremont?  He’s a son of Bower’s old governor.’

‘No, what lectures?’

’Bower tells me he’s a young fellow just come from Oxford or Cambridge, and he’s going to give some free lectures here in Lambeth.’