“Oh, use!” she cried, “I grant you its uselessness.  Doubt seems an ingrained quality.  I can’t help being a fatalist.”

“And yet you have taken your life in your own hands,” he reminded her, gently.

“Only to be convinced of its futility,” she replied.

Again, momentarily thrust back into himself, he wondered jealously once more what the disillusionments had been of that experience from before which she seemed, at times, ready to draw back a little the veil.

“A sense of futility is a sense of incompleteness,” he said, “and generally precedes a sense of power.”

“Ah, you have gained that!  Yet it must always have been latent in you —­you make one feel it.  But now!” she exclaimed, as though the discovery had just dawned on her, “now you will need power, now you will have to fight as you have never fought in your life.”

He found her enthusiasm as difficult to withstand as her stoicism.

“Yes, I shall have to fight,” he admitted.  Her partisanship was sweet.

“When you tell them what you have told me,” she continued, as though working it out in her own mind, “they will never submit to it, if they can help it.  My father will never submit to it.  They will try to put you out, as a heretic,—­won’t they?”

“I have an idea that they will,” he conceded, with a smile.

“And won’t they succeed?  Haven’t they the power?”

“It depends,—­in the first place, on whether the bishop thinks me a heretic.”

“Have you asked him?”

“No.”

“But can’t they make you resign?”

“They can deprive me of my salary.”

She did not press this.

“You mustn’t think me a martyr,” he pleaded, in a lighter tone.

She paid no heed to this protest, but continued to regard him with a face lighted by enthusiasm.

“Oh, that’s splendid of you!” she cried.  “You are going to speak the truth as you see it, and let them do their worst.  Of course, fundamentally, it isn’t merely because they’re orthodox that they won’t like it, although they’ll say so, and perhaps think so.  It will be because if you have really found the truth—­they will instinctively, fear its release.  For it has a social bearing, too—­hasn’t it?—­although you haven’t explained that part of it.”

“It has a distinct social bearing,” he replied, amazed at the way her mind flew forward and grasped the entire issue, in spite of the fact that her honesty still refused to concede his premises.  Such were the contradictions in her that he loved.  And, though she did not suspect it, she had in her the Crusader’s spirit.  “I have always remembered what you once said, that many who believed themselves Christians had an instinctive feeling that there is a spark in Christianity which, if allowed to fly, would start a conflagration beyond their control.  And that they had covered the spark with ashes.  I, too,” he added whimsically, “was buried under the ashes.”