off a donkey, Athelny," she answered
calmly.

She succeeded in buttoning her gloves, but before she went she turned to
Philip with a kindly, slightly embarrassed smile.

"You'll stay to tea, won't you? Athelny likes someone to talk to, and it's
not often he gets anybody who's clever enough."

"Of course he'll stay to tea," said Athelny. Then when his wife had gone:
"I make a point of the children going to Sunday school, and I like Betty
to go to church. I think women ought to be religious. I don't believe
myself, but I like women and children to."

Philip, strait-laced in matters of truth, was a little shocked by this
airy attitude.

"But how can you look on while your children are being taught things which
you don't think are true?"

"If they're beautiful I don't much mind if they're not true. It's asking
a great deal that things should appeal to your reason as well as to your
sense of the aesthetic. I wanted Betty to become a Roman Catholic, I
should have liked to see her converted in a crown of paper flowers, but
she's hopelessly Protestant. Besides, religion is a matter of temperament;
you will believe anything if you have the religious turn of mind, and if
you haven't it doesn't matter what beliefs were instilled into you, you
will grow out of them. Perhaps religion is the best school of morality. It
is like one of those drugs you gentlemen use in medicine which carries
another in solution: it is of no efficacy in itself, but enables the other
to be absorbed. You take your morality because it is combined with
religion; you lose the religion and the morality stays behind. A man is
more likely to be a good man if he has learned goodness through the love
of God than through a perusal of Herbert Spencer."

This was contrary to all Philip's ideas. He still looked upon Christianity
as a degrading bondage that must be cast away at any cost; it was
connected subconsciously in his mind with the dreary services in the
cathedral at Tercanbury, and the long hours of boredom in the cold church
at Blackstable; and the morality of which Athelny spoke was to him no more
than a part of the religion which a halting intelligence preserved, when
it had laid aside the beliefs which alone made it reasonable. But while he
was meditating a reply Athelny, more interested in hearing himself speak
than in discussion, broke into a tirade upon Roman Catholicism. For him it
was an essential part of Spain; and Spain meant much to him, be