There is another reason for my telling you now of this decision of
mine to remain a clergyman," he continued. "It is because I value your
respect and friendship, and I hope you will believe that I would not take
this course unless I saw my way clear to do it with sincerity."

"One has only to look at you to see that you are sincere," she said
gently, with a thrill in her voice that almost unmanned him. "I told you
once that I should never have forgiven myself if I had wrecked your life.
I meant it. I am very glad."

It was his turn to be silent.

"Just because I cannot see how it would be possible to remain in the
Church after one had been--emancipated, so to speak,"--she smiled at
him,--"is no reason why you may not have solved the problem."

Such was the superfine quality of her honesty. Yet she trusted him!
He was made giddy by a desire, which he fought down, to justify himself
before her. His eye beheld her now as the goddess with the scales in her
hand, weighing and accepting with outward calm the verdict of the balance
. . . . Outward calm, but inner fire.

"It makes no difference," she pursued evenly, bent on choosing her words,
"that I cannot personally understand your emancipation, that mine is
different. I can only see the preponderance of evil, of deception,
of injustice--it is that which shuts out everything else. And it's
temperamental, I suppose. By looking at you, as I told you, I can see
that your emancipation is positive, while mine remains negative. You
have somehow regained a conviction that the good is predominant, that
there is some purpose in the universe."

He assented. Once more she relapsed into thought, while he sat
contemplating her profile. She turned to him again with a tremulous
smile.

"But isn't a conviction that the good is predominant, that there is a
purpose in the universe, a long way from the positive assertions in the
Creeds?" she asked. "I remember, when I went through what you would
probably call disintegration, and which seemed to me enlightenment, that
the Creeds were my first stumbling-blocks. It seemed wrong to repeat
them."

"I am glad you spoke of this," he replied gravely. "I have arrived at
many answers to that difficulty--which did not give me the trouble I had
anticipated. In the first place, I am convinced that it was much more of
a difficulty ten, twenty, thirty years ago than it is to-day. That which
I formerly thought was a radical tendency towards atrophy,