ous grudge that he could not share the other kinship too.

"It is very beautiful and noble," he said. "I should like to feel for it
as you do; but what I should like still better would be to have the same
clear certainty of faith, the same conviction that what they were doing
was the only right thing to do which made both building and prayer so
unfaltering in those days. We can't be so sure even of the span of an
arch now."

"No--nor can you be content with the old span, even though it is clearly
the best by all rules," said Reginald. The other smiled; he was the most
speculative of the two, being perhaps the most thoughtful; and he had no
fifteenth-century chapel to charm, nor old foundation to give him an
anchor. He smiled, but there was a little envy in his mind. Even to have
one's life set out before one within clear lines like this, would not
that be something? If it had but been possible, no doubt saying prayers
for the world, even with no better than the old men of the College to
say amen, had something more beautiful in it than tours of agitation for
the Liberation Society; but Northcote knew that for him it was not
possible, any more than was the tonsure of Reginald's predecessor, who
had said mass when first those pinnacles were reared towards heaven.
After he had smiled he sighed, for the old faith was more lovely than
all the new agitations; he felt a little ashamed of the Liberation
Society, so long as he stood under that groined and glorious roof.

"May!" said some one, coming in suddenly. "I want you to go to the
hospital for me. I am obliged to go off to town on urgent
business--convocation work; and I must get a lawyer's opinion about the
reredos question; there is not a moment to lose. Go and see the people
in the pulmonary ward, there's a good fellow; and there are two or three
bad accidents; and that old woman who is ill in Brown's cottage, you saw
her the other day; and the Simmonds in Back Grove Street. I should have
had a day's work well cut out, if I had not had this summons to town;
but the reredos question is of the first importance, you know."

"I'll go," said Reginald. There is nothing more effectual in showing us
the weakness of any habitual fallacy or assumption than to hear it
sympathetically, through the ears, as it were, of a sceptic. Reginald,
seeing Northcote's keen eyes gleam at the sound of the Rector's voice,
instinctively fell into sympathy with him, and heard the speech through