“Now you know the truth,” he answered, with hard eyes.  “I am a cad who has played a crooked trick on a quiet village and a decent woman for a private reason of his own.  I might have played it successfully on any other woman; I have hit the one woman on whom it cannot be played.  It’s just like my damned luck.  The plain truth is,” and here when he came to the plain truth he boggled and blundered as Evan had done in telling it to the girl in the motor-car.

“The plain truth is,” he said at last, “that I am James Turnbull the atheist.  The police are after me; not for atheism but for being ready to fight for it.”

“I saw something about you in a newspaper,” said the girl, with a simplicity which even surprise could never throw off its balance.

“Evan MacIan said there was a God,” went on the other, stubbornly, “and I say there isn’t.  And I have come to fight for the fact that there is no God; it is for that that I have seen this cursed island and your blessed face.”

“You want me really to believe,” said Madeleine, with parted lips, “that you think——­”

“I want you to hate me!” cried Turnbull, in agony.  “I want you to be sick when you think of my name.  I am sure there is no God.”

“But there is,” said Madeleine, quite quietly, and rather with the air of one telling children about an elephant.  “Why, I touched His body only this morning.”

“You touched a bit of bread,” said Turnbull, biting his knuckles.  “Oh, I will say anything that can madden you!”

“You think it is only a bit of bread,” said the girl, and her lips tightened ever so little.

“I know it is only a bit of bread,” said Turnbull, with violence.

She flung back her open face and smiled.  “Then why did you refuse to eat it?” she said.

James Turnbull made a little step backward, and for the first time in his life there seemed to break out and blaze in his head thoughts that were not his own.

“Why, how silly of them,” cried out Madeleine, with quite a schoolgirl gaiety, “why, how silly of them to call you a blasphemer!  Why, you have wrecked your whole business because you would not commit blasphemy.”

The man stood, a somewhat comic figure in his tragic bewilderment, with the honest red head of James Turnbull sticking out of the rich and fictitious garments of Camille Bert.  But the startled pain of his face was strong enough to obliterate the oddity.

“You come down here,” continued the lady, with that female emphasis which is so pulverizing in conversation and so feeble at a public meeting, “you and your MacIan come down here and put on false beards or noses in order to fight.  You pretend to be a Catholic commercial traveller from France.  Poor Mr. MacIan has to pretend to be a dissolute nobleman from nowhere.  Your scheme succeeds; you pick a quite convincing quarrel; you arrange a quite respectable duel; the duel you have