“Yes,” he answered slowly, “I am fond of him.  He has shown me a side of himself, perhaps, that other men have not seen,—­and he is very lonely.”

“You pity him.”  He started at her word.  “I guessed that from an expression that crossed your face when we were at the table.  But surely you must have observed the incongruity of his relationship with your Church!  Surely, in preaching as you did this morning against materialism, individualism, absorption in the pursuit of wealth, you must have had my father in mind as the supreme example!  And yet he listened to you as serenely as though he had never practised any of these things!

“Clergymen wonder why Christianity doesn’t make more progress to-day; well, what strikes the impartial observer who thinks about the subject at all, as one reason, is the paralyzing inconsistency of an alliance between those who preach the brotherhood of man and those who are opposed to it.  I’ve often wondered what clergymen would say about it, if they were frank—­only I never see any clergymen.”

He was strongly agitated.  He did not stop—­strangely enough—­to reflect how far they had gone, to demand by what right she brought him to the bar, challenged the consistency of his life.  For she had struck, with a ruthless precision, at the very core of his trouble, revealed it for what it was.

“Yes,” he said, “I can see how we may be accused of inconsistency, and with much justice.”

His refusal to excuse and vindicate himself impressed her as no attempt at extenuation could have done.  Perhaps, in that moment, her quick instinct divined something of his case, something of the mental suffering he strove to conceal.  Contrition shone in her eyes.

“I ought not to have said that,” she exclaimed gently.  “It is so easy for outsiders to criticize those who are sincere—­and I am sure you are.  We cannot know all the perplexities.  But when we look at the Church, we are puzzled by that—­which I have mentioned—­and by other things.”

“What other things?” he demanded.

She hesitated in her turn.

“I suppose you think it odd, my having gone to church, feeling as I do,” she said.  “But St. John’s is now the only place vividly associated with my mother.  She was never at home here, in this house.  I always go at least once when I am out here.  And I listened to your sermon intently.”

“Yes.”

“I wanted to tell you this:  you interested me as I had not been interested since I was twenty, when I made a desperate attempt to become a Christian—­and failed.  Do you know how you struck me?  It was as a man who actually had a great truth which he was desperately trying to impart, and could not.  I have not been in a church more than a dozen times in the last eight years, but you impressed me as a man who felt something —­whatever it is.”

He did not speak.