’If Mr. Chilvers were brought before the ecclesiastical authorities and compelled to make a clear statement of his faith, what sect, in all the history of heresies, would he really seem to belong to?’

‘I know too little of him, and too little of heresies.’

’Do you suppose for a moment that he sincerely believes the dogmas of his Church?’

Martin bit his lip and looked uneasy.

‘We can’t judge him, Sidwell.’

‘I don’t know,’ she persisted.  ’It seems to me that he does his best to give us the means of judging him.  I half believe that he often laughs in himself at the success of his audacity.’

‘No, no.  I think the man is sincere.’

This was very uncomfortable ground, but Sidwell would not avoid it.  Her eyes flashed, and she spoke with a vehemence such as Martin had never seen in her.

’Undoubtedly sincere in his determination to make a figure in the world.  But a Christian, in any intelligible sense of that much-abused word,—­no!  He is one type of the successful man of our day.  Where thousands of better and stronger men struggle vainly for fair recognition, he and his kind are glorified.  In comparison with a really energetic man, he is an acrobat.  The crowd stares at him and applauds, and there is nothing he cares for so much as that kind of admiration.’

Martin kept silence, and in a few minutes succeeded in; broaching a wholly different subject.

Not long after this, Mr. Chilvers paid a call at the conventional hour.  Sidwell, hoping to escape, invited two girls to step out with her on to the lawn.  The sun was sinking, and, as she stood with eyes fixed upon it, the Rev. Bruno’s voice disagreeably broke her reverie.  She was perforce involved in a dialogue, her companions moving aside.

‘What a magnificent sky!’ murmured Chilvers. ’"There sinks the nebulous star.”  Forgive me, I have fallen into a tiresome trickof quoting.  How differently a sunset is viewed nowadays from what it was in old times!  Our impersonal emotions are on a higher plane—­ don’t you think so?  Yes, scientific discovery has done more for religion than all the ages of pious imagination.  A theory of Galileo or Newton is more to the soul than a psalm of David.’

‘You think so?’ Sidwell asked, coldly.

In everyday conversation she was less suave than formerly.  This summer she had never worn her spray of sweet-brier, and the omission might have been deemed significant of a change in herself.  When the occasion offered, she no longer hesitated to express a difference of opinion; at times she uttered her dissent with a bluntness which recalled Buckland’s manner in private.

‘Does the comparison seem to you unbecoming?’ said Chilvers, with genial condescension.  ‘Or untrue?’

‘What do you mean by “the soul"?’ she inquired, still gazing away from him.

’The principle of conscious life in man—­that which understands and worships.’