way homewards, along a lane, the devil of his madness came upon him with a violence and transfiguration which changes the world.  He was standing smoking, for a moment, in the front of an interminable line of palings, when his eyes were opened.  Not a light shifted, not a leaf stirred, but he saw as if by a sudden change in the eyesight that this paling was an army of innumerable crosses linked together over hill and dale.  And he whirled up his heavy stick and went at it as if at an army.  Mile after mile along his homeward path he broke it down and tore it up.  For he hated the cross and every paling is a wall of crosses.  When he returned to his house he was a literal madman.  He sat upon a chair and then started up from it for the cross-bars of the carpentry repeated the intolerable image.  He flung himself upon a bed only to remember that this, too, like all workmanlike things, was constructed on the accursed plan.  He broke his furniture because it was made of crosses.  He burnt his house because it was made of crosses.  He was found in the river.”

Lucifer was looking at him with a bitten lip.

“Is that story really true?” he asked.

“Oh, no,” said Michael, airily.  “It is a parable.  It is a parable of you and all your rationalists.  You begin by breaking up the Cross; but you end by breaking up the habitable world.  We leave you saying that nobody ought to join the Church against his will.  When we meet you again you are saying that no one has any will to join it with.  We leave you saying that there is no such place as Eden.  We find you saying that there is no such place as Ireland.  You start by hating the irrational and you come to hate everything, for everything is irrational and so——­”

Lucifer leapt upon him with a cry like a wild beast’s.  “Ah,” he screamed, “to every man his madness.  You are mad on the cross.  Let it save you.”

And with a herculean energy he forced the monk backwards out of the reeling car on to the upper part of the stone ball.  Michael, with as abrupt an agility, caught one of the beams of the cross and saved himself from falling.  At the same instant Lucifer drove down a lever and the ship shot up with him in it alone.

“Ha! ha!” he yelled, “what sort of a support do you find it, old fellow?”

“For practical purposes of support,” replied Michael grimly, “it is at any rate a great deal better than the ball.  May I ask if you are going to leave me here?”

“Yes, yes.  I mount!  I mount!” cried the professor in ungovernable excitement. “Altiora peto.  My path is upward.”

“How often have you told me, Professor, that there is really no up or down in space?” said the monk.  “I shall mount up as much as you will.”

“Indeed,” said Lucifer, leering over the side of the flying ship.  “May I ask what you are going to do?”

The monk pointed downward at Ludgate Hill.  “I am going,” he said, “to climb up into a star.”