e, we might go to see the professor; he has promised to show me some
experiments."

"Electricity?" Tom pricked up his ears. "Not half a bad idea. If you'll
help me we can polish off the letters in an hour or so, and be free by
eight o'clock."

They set to work, and between them disposed of the correspondence.

It was a great relief to Erica after her long day's work to be out in
the cool evening air. The night was fine but very windy, indeed the
sudden gusts at the street corners made her glad to take Tom's arm.
Once, as they rather slackened their speed, half baffled by the storm, a
sentence from a passer-by fell on their ears. The speaker looked like a
countryman.

"Give me a good gas-burner with pipes and a meter that a honest man can
understand! Now this 'ere elective light I say it's not canny; I've no
belief in things o' that kind, it won't never--"

The rest of the speech died away in the distance. Tom and Erica laughed,
but the incident set Erica thinking. Here was a man who would not
believe what he could not understand, who wanted "pipes and a meter,"
and for want of comprehensible outward signs pooh-poohed the great new
discovery.

"Tom," she said slowly, and with the manner of one who makes a very
unpleasant suggestion, reluctantly putting forward an unwelcome thought,
"suppose if, after all, we are like that man, and reject a grand
discovery because we don't know and are too ignorant to understand! Tom,
just suppose if, after all, Christianity should be true and we in the
wrong!"

"Just suppose if, after all, the earth should be a flat plain with the
sun moving round it!" replied Tom scornfully.

They were walking down the Strand; he did not speak for some minutes, in
fact he was looking at the people who passed by them. For the first
time in his life a great contrast struck him. Disreputable vulgarity,
wickedness, and vice stared him in the face, then involuntarily he
turned to Erica and looked down at her scrutinizingly as he had never
looked before. She was evidently wrapped in thought but it was not the
intellect in her face which he thought of just then, though it was ever
noticeable, nor was it the actual beauty of feature which struck him, it
was rather an undefined consciousness that here was a purity which was
adorable. From that moment he became no longer a boy, but a man with
a high standard of womanhood. Instantly he thought with regret of his
scornful little speech--it was contemptibl