e
sunset scenery. Under a tree in this commanding yet neglected spot was
an old ramshackle wooden seat. On this seat sat the two priests still in
serious speech together. The gorgeous green and gold still clung to
the darkening horizon; but the dome above was turning slowly from
peacock-green to peacock-blue, and the stars detached themselves more
and more like solid jewels. Mutely motioning to his followers, Valentin
contrived to creep up behind the big branching tree, and, standing there
in deathly silence, heard the words of the strange priests for the first
time.

After he had listened for a minute and a half, he was gripped by a
devilish doubt. Perhaps he had dragged the two English policemen to the
wastes of a nocturnal heath on an errand no saner than seeking figs on
its thistles. For the two priests were talking exactly like priests,
piously, with learning and leisure, about the most aerial enigmas of
theology. The little Essex priest spoke the more simply, with his round
face turned to the strengthening stars; the other talked with his
head bowed, as if he were not even worthy to look at them. But no more
innocently clerical conversation could have been heard in any white
Italian cloister or black Spanish cathedral.

The first he heard was the tail of one of Father Brown's sentences,
which ended: "... what they really meant in the Middle Ages by the
heavens being incorruptible."

The taller priest nodded his bowed head and said:

"Ah, yes, these modern infidels appeal to their reason; but who can
look at those millions of worlds and not feel that there may well be
wonderful universes above us where reason is utterly unreasonable?"

"No," said the other priest; "reason is always reasonable, even in the
last limbo, in the lost borderland of things. I know that people charge
the Church with lowering reason, but it is just the other way. Alone
on earth, the Church makes reason really supreme. Alone on earth, the
Church affirms that God himself is bound by reason."

The other priest raised his austere face to the spangled sky and said:

"Yet who knows if in that infinite universe--?"

"Only infinite physically," said the little priest, turning sharply
in his seat, "not infinite in the sense of escaping from the laws of
truth."

Valentin behind his tree was tearing his fingernails with silent fury.
He seemed almost to hear the sniggers of the English detectives whom
he had brought so far on a fantastic gue