_love_ them. Oh! if I'd had my way I'd
have been born when one could have _piled_ up and splashed it about and
had it everywhere--jewels, clothes, processions--Ah! that's why I hate
this generation that's coming; the generation that you believe in so
devoutly, it's so ugly. It wears ugly things, it likes ugly people, it
believes in talking about ugly morals and making ugly laws...." Then she
laughed--"It's funny, isn't it? I had to use the age I was born into, I
cut my cloth to it, but what a figure I'd have made in any century
before the nineteenth. All the old times were best. You could command
and see that you were obeyed.... None of your Individualism then,
Christopher."

She was silent for a time and he said nothing. He was thinking about
Breton, wondering where he was, feeling that he should not have let him
go. She said suddenly:

"Christopher, do you think there's a God?"

"I know there is."

"Well, I know there isn't--so there we are. One of us will find that
we've made a mistake in a few years' time."

He said nothing. At last she began again:

"You're sure of it?"

"Quite sure."

"So like you--and you get a deal of comfort from it, no doubt. But what
kind of a God, Christopher?"

"A just God--a loving God."

"How any doctor can say that truthfully! The pain, the crime you must
have seen----"

"Exactly. I've known, I suppose, of as much misery, as much agony, much
wickedness as most men in a lifetime. I've never had a case under my
notice that hasn't shown the necessity for pain, the necessity for
struggle, for defeat, for disaster. If this life were all, still I
should have had proof enough that a loving God was moving in the world."

She lay back, smiling at him.

"You're a sentimentalist of course. I've heard you talk before. You're
wrong, Christopher, badly wrong. I shall prove it before you will."

"Well," he said, smiling back at her, "we'll see."

"Oh, yes, you're a sentimentalist of the very worst--I don't know that I
like you the less for it. I'm an old pagan and it's served me all my
life. Ah! there's the thunder!"

She sat up in bed, her cap pushed back, her skinny arms stretched out in
a kind of ecstasy. "There! That's it! That's the kind of thing I like!
There's your God for you, Christopher."

A flash of lightning flung the room into unreality.

"I'd hoped for one more good storm before I went. I've been waiting all
day for this."

He never forgot the strange figure tha