appealing as he looked at her.

"I say, M-m-marcella. I'm sorry I said all those nasty things about your
father."

"There you are again, Louis! Forget them all! Forget everything but the
future now. I can't imagine where I've got this conviction from, but
it's absolutely right, I know. If you'll wipe out all your memory and
start clean, you'll be cured."

"I could never do as your father did--all that religion business."

"I don't think I could, Louis. Father saw God as a militant Captain,
someone outside himself. I'd never get thinking that about God. But it
seems to me, in your case, you want to find someone you could trust,
someone who would take the responsibility from you. Just as God did for
father. Even if we say there is no God at all, he thought there was and
acted on his thought--I suppose it's when we feel weak as father did
that we get the idea of God at all."

"It all seems rot to me," he told her. "I laugh at God--as a relic of
fetishism."

There was a long, hopeless silence. At last he said dully:

"There are some doctors--our old Dean at St. Crispin's, that I could
throw myself upon as your father threw himself upon God. But they're not
here."

As she sat, frowning, trying most desperately to help him, finding her
unready brain a blank thing like the desert, realizing that, in all her
reading there was nothing that could help, since there was no strong
helper in the world save that Strong Man God who had gripped her
father's imagination and could never grip Louis's, a whole pageant of
dreams passed before her; dreams, intangible ideas which she grasped
eagerly--visions--she saw herself John the Baptist, "making straight the
way of the Lord"--she saw Siegfried, King Arthur--and, with a
heart-leaping gasp she asked herself, "Why should not I be Louis's
Deliverer? Why should not I be God's pathway to him? Why should not I be
Siegfried?" And all the time her brain, peopled with myths, saw only the
shining armour, the glittering fight; she did not see the path of God
deeply rutted by trampling feet, burnt by the blazing footsteps of God.
She heard herself as John's great crying voice and heeded the prison
and the martyrdom not at all: it was a moment's flash, a moment's
revelation. Then she turned to him. Her eyes were very bright. She spoke
rapidly, nervously.

"Louis--that doctor you know--the Dean. Do you think they are the only
wise folks on earth? I mean, do you think wisdom begins and ends