re in no way interested.

Within a few feet of these congenial shipmates Herbert Courtland sat
looking across the shining ripples to the shining lights of the coast;
wondering how he came to be on the sea instead of on the shore. Was this
indeed the night over which his imagination had gloated for months?
Was it indeed possible that this was the very night following the
day--Thursday--for which he had engaged himself in accordance with the
letter that he still carried in his pocket?

How on earth did it come that he was sitting with his arm over the
bulwarks of a yacht instead of----Oh, the thing was a miracle--a
miracle! He could think of it in no other light than that of a miracle.

Well, if it were a miracle, it had been the work of God, and God had to
be thanked for it. He had explained to Phyllis once that he thought of
God only as a Principle--as the Principle which worked in opposition
to the principle of nature. That was certainly the God which had been
evolved out of modern civilization. The pagan gods had been just the
opposite. They had been founded on natural principles. The Hebrew
tradition that God had made man in his own image was the reverse of the
scheme of the pagan man who had made God after his own image; in the
image of man created he God.

But holding the theory that he held--that God was the sometimes
successful opponent to the principles of nature (which he called the
Devil)--Herbert Courtland felt that this was the very God to whom his
thanks were due for the miracle that had been performed on his behalf.

"Thank God--thank God--thank God!" he murmured, looking out over the
rippling waters, steel gray in the soft shadow of the summer's night.

But then he held that "thank God" was but a figure of speech.

"Tinky-tink, tinky-tink, tinky-tinky-tinky-tinky-tinky-tinky-tink," went
the youth with the banjo in the bows.

CHAPTER XXIII.

ITS MOUTHINGS OF THE PAST HAD BECOME ITS MUMBLINGS OF THE PRESENT.

It was very distressing--very disappointing! The bishop would neither
institute proceedings against the rector of St. Chad's nor state plainly
if it was his intention to proceed against that clergyman. When some
people suggested very delicately--the way ordinary people would suggest
anything to a bishop--that it was surely not in sympathy with the
organization of the Church for any clergyman to take advantage of his
position and his pulpit to cast sometimes ridicule, sometimes abuse,
upo