salt with our eggs, and they go fumbling about in the
mazes of Leviticus, or the Minor Prophets."

He laughed, not maliciously, but with a certain pitying contempt, as he
said:

"The average _professing_ Christian is about as much like the New
Testament model of what he should be, as is the straw-stuffed scarecrow
in the field, in the pockets of the costume of which the birds conceive
it to be the latest joke to build. But I am digressing, I was beginning
about the 'days of Noah' and their _near_ future repetition on the earth."

"'_Near repetition_?' How do you mean, Colonel?" Judith Montmarte
leaned a little eagerly toward him. In the ordinary way, alone with a
man of his type she would have played the coquette. To-day she thought
nothing of such trifling. There was something so different in his
manner, as he spoke of the things that were engaging them, to even the
ordinary preacher.

The pair were as utterly alone as though they had been on the wide, wide
sea together in an open boat. She had said truly, over-night, "no one
ever comes near the library."

"I mean," he said, replying to her question, "that the seven chief causes
of the apostasy which brought down God's wrath upon the Antediluvians,
have already begun to manifest themselves upon the earth, in such a
measure as to warrant one's saying that 'as it was in the days of Noah,
so it is again today,' and if the New Testament is true in every
letter--we may expect the Return of the Christ at any moment."

She was staring amazedly at him--enquiring, eager, but evidently puzzled.
But she made no sound or sign of interruption, and he went on:

"The first element of the Antediluvian apostasy was the worship of God as
Creator and Benefactor, and not as the Jehovah-God of Covenant and Mercy.
And surely that is what we find everywhere to-day. People acknowledge a
Supreme Being, and accept Christ as a model man, but they flatly deny the
Fall, Hereditary Sin, the need of an Atonement, and all else that is
connected with the Great Evangel. The _Second_ cause of Antediluvian
apostasy was the disregard of the original law of marriage, and the
increased prominence of the female sex."

Judith Montmarte smiled back into his face, as she said:

"Oh that you would propound that in a convention of New Women! And
yet--yet--yes, you are right, as to your fact, as regards life, to-day."

The pair had a merry, friendly spar for a moment or two, then, at her
reque