no sense of sin?"

"I'm almost afraid not," acknowledged Austin, with well-bred concern.
"Ought I to have?"

"We all ought to have," replied the vicar sternly. "We have all
sinned, and come short of the glory of God."

"I don't see how we could have done otherwise," remarked Austin, who
was getting rather bored. "Little people like us can't be expected to
come up to a standard which I suppose implies divine perfection. I
dare say I've done lots of sins, but for the life of me I've no idea
what they were. I don't think I ever thought about it."

"It's time you thought about it now, then," said the vicar, getting
up. "I won't worry you any more to-day, because I see you're tired.
But I shall pray for you, and when next I come I hope you'll
understand my meaning more clearly than you do at present."

"That is very kind of you," said Austin, putting out his almost
transparent hand. "I'm awfully sorry to give you so much trouble.
You'll see Aunt Charlotte before you go away? I know she'll expect
you to go in for a cup of tea."

So the vicar escaped, almost as glad to do so as Austin was to be left
in peace. And the worst of it was that, though he cudgelled his brains
for many hours that night, he could not think of any sins in
particular that Austin had been in the habit of committing. He was
kind, he was pure, and he was unselfish. His exaggerated abuse of
people he didn't like was more than half humorous, and was rather a
fault than a sin. Yet he must be a sinner somehow, because everybody
was. Perhaps his sin consisted in his not being pious in the
evangelical sense of the word. Yet he loved goodness, and the vicar
had once heard a great Roman Catholic divine say that loving goodness
was the same thing as loving God. But Austin had never said that he
loved God; he had only said that he was much obliged to Him. The poor
vicar worried himself about all this until he fell asleep, taking
refuge in the reflection that if he couldn't understand the state of
Austin's soul there was always the probability that God did.

Aunt Charlotte, on her side, was too much absorbed in her anxiety and
sorrow to trouble herself with such misgivings. The light of her life
was burning very low, and bade fair to be extinguished altogether.
What were theological conundrums to her now? It would be positively
wicked to fear that anything dreadful could happen to Austin because
he had forgotten his catechism and was not impressed by the vica