worth having in the
bowels of the earth, he burrows like a mole and gets it. Let him once see
utility in flying, give him time and opportunity, and he will fly. So if
it is to his interests to be clean-lived, high-minded, exemplary, he will
be all these things to admiration. Or, if he should happen to have lost
the _gout_ for virtue, if he determines that Evil shall be his good, he
will make it so." He smiled dourly. "Deprive him of a solid reason for
living, he can die. Hold up before his dying eyes the prospect of
continued existence under hopeful conditions, he takes up his bed and
walks, like the moribund paralytic in the Gospel you preach. You're a
living proof of the human power of working miracles.... Granted I cut away
a tumour from under your breast-bone more skilfully than a certain
percentage of surgeons could have done it. But what brought you safely
through the operation, healed your wound by the first intention, and set
you on your legs again? I'll trouble you to tell me?"

"The mercy and the grace of God," says the Chaplain, "manifested in His
unworthy servant through your science and your skill."

"You employ the technical terminology of your profession," Saxham answers,
with a shrug.

The blank stare and the congested redness have gone out of his eyes, and
his voice is less dull and toneless. He is coming back to his outward self
again, even while the inner man lies mangled and bleeding, crushed by that
tremendous broadsword stroke of Fate that has been dealt him by the gold
pen of Lady Hannah, and he is ready enough to argue with the Chaplain. He
gets off the bed and slips on his jacket, takes a turn or two across the
narrow floor-space, then leans against the distempered wall beside the
window, puffing at his jetty briar-root, his muscular arms folded on his
great chest, his powerful shoulders bowed, his square, black head thrust
forward, and his blue eyes coolly studying Julius as he talks.

"Let me--without rubbing your cloth the wrong way--put the case in mine.
Your belief in a Power that my reason tells me is non-existent stimulated
your nervous centres, roused and sustained in you the determination
without which my science and my skill--and I do not value them lightly, I
assure you--would have availed you nothing. You said to yourself, 'If God
will it, I shall get over this,' and because _you_ willed it, it was so.
Were I a drunkard, an outcast, the very refuse of humanity, tainted with
vice