s sermon?'

Godwin was trifling with a pair of nut-crackers, but the nervousness
evident in his fingers did not prevent him from replying with a natural
air of deliberation.

'I was especially struck with the passage about the barren fig-tree.'

The words might have expressed a truth, but in that case a tone of
sarcasm must have winged them. As it was, they involved either
hypocrisy or ungenerous irony at the expense of his questioner.
Buckland could not but understand them in the latter sense; his face
darkened. At that moment, Peak met his eye, and encountered its steady
searching gaze with a perfectly calm smile. Half-a-dozen pulsings of
his heart--violent, painful, and the fatal hour of his life had struck.

'What had he to say about it?' Buckland asked, carelessly.

Peak's reply was one of those remarkable efforts of mind--one might
say, of character--which are sometimes called forth, without
premeditation, almost without consciousness, by a profound moral
crisis. A minute or two ago he would have believed it impossible to
recall and state in lucid terms the arguments to which, as he sat in
the Cathedral, he had barely given ear; he remembered vaguely that the
preacher (whose name he knew not till now) had dwelt for a few moments
on the topic indicated, but at the time he was indisposed to listen
seriously, and what chance was there that the chain of thought had
fixed itself in his memory? Now, under the marvelling regard of his
conscious self, he poured forth an admirable rendering of the Canon's
views, fuller than the original--more eloquent, more subtle. For five
minutes he held his hearers in absorbed attention, even Buckland
bending forward with an air of genuine interest; and when he stopped,
rather suddenly, there followed a silence.

'Mr. Peak,' said the host, after a cough of apology, 'you have made
that clearer to me than it was yesterday. I must thank you.'

Godwin felt that a slight bow of acknowledgment was perhaps called for,
but not a muscle would obey his will. He was enervated; perspiration
stood on his forehead. The most severe physical effort could not have
reduced him to a feebler state.

Sidwell was speaking:

'Mr. Peak has developed what Canon Grayling only suggested.'

'A brilliant effort of exegesis,' exclaimed Buckland, with a
good-natured laugh.

Again the young men exchanged looks. Godwin smiled as one might under a
sentence of death. As for the other, his suspicion had vanis