ing on his gauntleted gloves.
Dicky trotted beside him. Manasseh followed in attendance. Behind them
in the porchway the landlady bobbed unregarded, like a piece of
clockwork gradually running down.

"Hey!" The Collector, as he reached the gate, lifted his chin sharply--
threw up his head as a finely bred animal scents battle or danger.
"What's this? A riot, up the street?"

The grooms could not tell him, for the sound had reached their ears but
a second or two before the question; a dull confused murmur out of
which, as it increased to a clamour and drew nearer, sharper outcries
detached themselves, and the shrill voices of women. A procession had
turned the corner of the head of the avenue--a booing, howling rabble.

The Collector stepped to his horse's rein, flung himself into saddle,
and rode forward at a foot's pace to meet the tumult.

Suddenly his hand tightened on the rein, and Bayard came to a halt; but
his master did not perceive this. The hand's movement had been nervous,
involuntary. He sat erect--stood, rather, from the stirrup--his nostril
dilated, his brain scarcely believing what his eyes saw.

"The swine!" he said slowly, to himself. His teeth were shut and the
words inaudible. "The swine!" he repeated.

Men have done, in the name of religion and not so long ago--indeed are
perhaps doing now and daily--deeds so vile that mere decency cannot face
describing them. It is a question if mere decency (by which I mean the
good instinct of civilised man) will not in the end purge faith clean of
religion; if, while men dispute and hate and inflict cruelty for
religion, they are not all the while outgrowing it. Libraries, for
example, are written to prove that unbaptized infants come out of
darkness to draw a fleeting breath or two and pass to hell-fire; the
dispute occupies men for generations--and lo! one day the world finds it
has no use for any such question. Time--no thanks to the theologians--
has educated it, and this thing at any rate it would no longer believe
if it could, as it certainly cannot. Faith never yet has burnt man or
woman at the stake. Religion has burnt its tens of thousands.

Behind the first two or three ranks of the mob--an exultant mob of grown
men, grown women, and (worst of all) little children--plodded a grey
horse, drawing a cart. Behind the cart, bound to it, with a thong tight
about her fire-scorched wrists--But no; it is not to be written.

They had strippe