ooking out of
the caravan window, "my last words to you are," he corrected himself,
"is to avoid beer. You can touch up the horse, Mr. Smillie."

"I'll come and touch you up, you big-mouthed Bible thumpers," a rich
voice shouted from the inn door. "Yes, you sit outside my public-house
and swill minerals when you're so full of gas already you could light a
corporation gasworks. Avoid beer, you walking bellows? Step down out of
that travelling menagerie, and I'll give you 'avoid beer.' You'll avoid
more than beer before I've finished with you."

But the gospel bearers without paying any attention to the tirade went
on their way; and Mark who did not wait to listen to the innkeeper's
abuse of all religion and all religious people went on his way in the
opposite direction.

Swinging homeward over the Cotswolds Mark flattered himself on a victory
over heretics, and he imagined his adversaries entering Wield that
afternoon, the prey of doubt and mortification. At the highest point of
the road he even ventured to suppose that they might find themselves at
Evensong outside St. Andrew's Church and led within by the grace of the
Holy Spirit that they might renounce their errors before the altar.
Indeed, it was not until he was back in the Rectory that the futility of
his own bearing overwhelmed him with shame. Anxious to atone for his
self-conceit, Mark gave the Rector an account of the incident.

"It seems to me that I behaved very feebly, don't you think?"

"That kind of fellow is a hard nut to crack," the Rector said
consolingly. "And you can't expect just by quoting text against text to
effect an instant conversion. Don't forget that your friends are in
their way as great enthusiasts probably as yourself."

"Yes, but it's humiliating to be imagining oneself leading a revival of
the preaching friars and then to behave like that. What strikes me now,
when it's too late, is that I ought to have waited and taken the
opportunity to tackle the innkeeper. He was just the ordinary man who
supposes that religion is his natural enemy. You must admit that I
missed a chance there."

"I don't want to check your missionary zeal," said the Rector. "But I
really don't think you need worry yourself about an omission of that
kind so long before you are ordained. If I didn't know you as well as I
do, I might even be inclined to consider such a passion for souls at
your age a little morbid. I wish with all my heart you'd gone to
Oxford,"