Mr. Heard stood alone, his back turned to the Master.  Moonlight still flooded the earth, the lanterns were flickering and sputtering.  Some had gone out, leaving gaps of darkness in the lighted walls.  Many of the guests retired without bidding farewell to their host; he liked them to feel at their ease, to take “French leave” whenever so disposed—­to depart “A L’ANGLAISE,” as the French say.  The garden was nearly empty.  A great quietude had fallen upon its path and thickets.  From afar resounded the boisterous chorus of a party of revellers loth to quit the scene; it was suddenly broken by a terrific crash and bursts of laughter.  Some table had been knocked over.

Standing there, the bishop could not but listen to Keith, who had raised his voice in emphasis and was saying to the Count, in his best Keithean manner: 

“I am just coming to that point.  A spring-board is what humanity needs.  What better one can be contrived than this pure unadulterated Byzantianism.  Cretinism, I call it.  Look at the Orthodox Church.  A repository of apocalyptic nonsense such as no sane man can take seriously.  Nonsense of the right kind, the uncompromising kind.  That is my point.  The paralysing, sterilizing cult of these people offers a far better spring-board into a clean element of thought than our English Church, whose demi-VIERGE concessions to common sense afford seductive resting-places to the intellectually weak-knee’d.  Do I make myself clear?  I’m getting infernally thirsty.”

“I quite agree with you, my friend.  The Russians have got a better spring-board than the English.  The queer thing is, that the Russians won’t jump, whereas the Englishman often does.  Well, well!  We cannot live without fools.”

Mr. Heard was slightly perturbed by these words.  A good fellow like Keith!  “Demi-VIERGE concessions to common sense”; what did he mean by that?  Did his church really make such concessions?

“I’ll think about it to-morrow,” he decided.

The Master, when they returned to him, had not budged from his resting-place.  The fingers still lay, starfish-wise, upon the folds of that soiled homespun; his eyes still stared out of the leafy bower; his face still wore its mask of placid imbecility.

The glass was empty.

Slowly, as on a pivot, his head turned in the direction of the bodyguard.

Forthwith some favourite disciple—­not Krasnojabkin, who happened to be escorting Madame Steynlin to her villa just then—­darted to his side; with the help of two lady-apostles known, respectively, as the “goldfinch” and the “red apple,” they conveyed him out of that shelter into the deserted, moonlit garden.  He leaned heavily on the arm of the youth; peevish sounds, quasi-human, proceeded from his colourless lips.  And now he was almost speaking; desirous, it seemed, of formulating some truth too deep for human utterance.

“I bet I know what he is saying,” whispered Keith.  “It’s something about the Man-God.”