t,
destroyed through it, damned socially and morally because of it ..."

The fierce words break from Saxham against his will. He resents the
betrayal of his own confidence savagely, even as he utters them. But they
are spoken, beyond recall. And the effect of the paragraph upon the
Chaplain is remarkable. His meek, luminous brown eyes blaze with
indignation. He is aflame, from the edge of his collar--a patent clerical
guillotine of washable xylonite, purchased at a famous travellers'
emporium in the Strand--to the thin, silky rings of dark hair that are
wearing from his high, pale temples. He says, and stutters angrily in
saying:

"This is a lie--a monstrous misstatement which shall be withdrawn
to-morrow!"

"How do you know that?"

The Chaplain crushes the _Siege Gazette_ into a ball, pitches it into a
corner of the room, grabs his Field-Service cap and the cane he carries in
lieu of the carbine or rifle without which the male laity of Gueldersdorp
and a good many of the women do not stir abroad, and makes a stride for
the door. He meets there Saxham, whose square face and powerful figure bar
his flaming exit.

"It is enough that I do know it. Kindly allow me to pass."

"What are you going to do?"

The Chaplain is plainly uncertain, as he wrestles with the clerical
guillotine of washable xylonite, and stammers something about
unwarrantable liberty and a lady's reputation! And Saxham recognises that
Saxham is not the only sufferer from the festering smart of jealousy, and
that the vivid red-and-white carnation-tinted beauty of the delicate face
in its setting of red-brown hair has grievously disturbed, if it has not
altogether dissipated, the pale young Anglican's views of the celibate
life.

Agnostic and Churchman, denier and believer, have split on the same
amatory rock. The knowledge breathes no sympathy in the Dop Doctor.

He observes the Chaplain's face, dispassionately and yet intently, as in
the old Hospital days he might have studied the expression of a monkey or
a guinea-pig, or other organism upon which he was experimenting with some
new drug. And the Reverend Julius demands, with resentful acerbity:

"What are you staring at? Do you imagine that the colour of my cloth
debars me from--from taking the part of a lady whose name has been dragged
before the public? I shall call at the office where this rag is published,
and insist upon a contradiction of this--this _canard_!"

"Don't you know who edi