ed Saxham, facing the
passionate emotion of the younger man as a basalt cliff might oppose a
breaking wave, "you had better be silent!"

"My right to speak," Julius retorted fiercely, "is better than you know.
When I endeavoured--unsuccessfully--to injure you, I robbed myself of my
belief in myself. But you--you who gave me back my earthly life, you have
robbed me of my faith in the Living and Eternal God. Do you know the
effect of Doubt, once planted in what was a faithful soul? It is a choking
fungus, a dry rot, a creeping palsy! Since that day at the Hospital at
Gueldersdorp, when you said to me, 'The Human Will is even more omnipotent
than the Deity, because it has created Him, out of its own need!' I have
done my daily duty as a priest to the numbing burden of that utterance--I
have preached the Gospel with it sounding in my ears." He wrung his hands,
that were wet as though they had been dipped in water. "I have tended
souls as mechanically as a gardener might water pots in which there was
nothing but dead sticks and dry earth!"

"Try to credit me when I tell you," said Saxham, wrung by the suffering in
the thin young face and in the beautiful haggard eyes, "that I never
meant the harm that I appear to have done! Nor can I recall that I have
habitually attacked your faith, or for that matter any Christian man's. I
remember that I was suffering, physically and mentally, upon the day you
particularly refer to, when you came upon me at the Hospital. I had seen
an announcement in the _Siege Gazette_ that ... I dare say you
understand?" He laughed harshly. "As to my theory of the Omnipotence of
Human Will, it is blown and exploded, and all the King's horses and all
the King's men will never set it back on the pedestal it has toppled from.
I owe you that admission, humbling to the pride that is left in me! Of how
far Will, in another man, may carry him, I dare not judge or calculate. My
own is a dead leaf, doomed to be the sport of any wind that blows!"

He took up the walking-stick he had leaned against a bookcase, and said,
pulling his hat down over his sombre eyes:

"The best of us are bad in spots, Parson: the worst of us are good in
patches. You Churchmen don't recognise that fact sufficiently.... And I
think no worse of you for what you have told me! If I have anything to
forgive--why, it is forgiven! Do you try, on the other hand, to think
leniently of a man who broke your staff of faith for you, and has nothin