voice of man barring the way to inquiry. God made man, and, as far as I have ever been able to learn, He made them all on one pattern. The offices and dignities they give themselves won’t make them one whit greater or more important in His eyes.”

“You are a democrat, I see,” said the beautiful woman, looking gravely and scrutinisingly at the eager flushed face, with its ruffled damp curls, and quick restless eyes.

“Well,” said Mrs Jefferson, “I don’t exactly know what I am. My views are liberal on most subjects. I’ve travelled a good bit, and I think that enlarges the mind. I’ve just run over to have a look at England. Our people are laughing at her pretty well. The Gladstone party have made a lovely hash of affairs haven’t they? But perhaps you don’t care for politics, being foreign.”

“Oh, yes, I do,” answered her strange companion. “And I am specially interested in English politics,” she added. “Like yourself I was curious to see a nation who seemed determined to court their own shame, and to deify the being whose career is signally marked by obloquy and disaster.”

“His day is pretty well over, I fancy,” said Mrs Jefferson, eagerly scenting an opportunity for a brilliant display of political knowledge. “That Irish business has settled him. They call him the greatest statesman of the age! A man at dinner last night was lauding him up to the skies. There was quite a battle about him. We showed, however, that, putting his talking powers aside, he really is no statesman—only a grasping selfish old bungler, who cares nothing for his country except it keeps him in office, and has done nothing really great or good during his whole career. They make a fuss about the Education Act, but the credit of passing that belongs to Foster. As for the Disestablishment of the Irish Church, that is a disgraceful business—a robbery of the dead who had left their money to support a faith they believed in. He is responsible—to my thinking—for all the anarchy, confusion and misery in that poor unhappy Ireland. I believe,” and she leant forward and dropped her voice, “I believe that at heart the man is more than half a Romanist. See how he has favoured the High Church party, and if ever he gives a clerical appointment it is always to a Ritualist priest. They don’t call themselves clergymen now. Well,” and she drew herself up once more, “I, for one, wouldn’t like to have his sins on my shoulders. I should think he ought to be haunted by as many victims as Napoleon Buonaparte. What with financial humbug, war taxes—the blunders of the Alabama business—the disgrace and bloodshed of the Transvaal affair and the Egyptian war—crowned by the undying and never to be forgotten shame of Gordon’s sacrificed life, I wonder he can lay down his head at night and sleep. When he heard of that hero Gordon’s death he should have taken a pistol and blown out his blundering brains. But perhaps,” she added more calmly, “he was afraid of meeting his victims until he couldn’t help himself. However, he might have gone into one of those ‘retreats’ his favourite Ritualists are so fond of, and spared England any more blunders and follies.”

“You are very bitter against him,” said the stranger calmly. “Be sure that his own actions will also be his own avengers. Life would be made much more tolerable if we would only keep that fact before us. To my mind there is no backbone or support in a religion that teaches irresponsibility. That is the great fault of you Christians. Your faith is not a thing you take hold of, and grasp and act upon. Hence your many national disasters. You shelve your future, or what you call your salvation, on the merits of a Sacrifice, and think yourselves relieved of all further trouble. In the world, and in society, religion is a tabooed subject—it is only kept for Sundays and for churches. I believe your clergy know no more of the real doctrines of Christianity, those deep and mystical truths underlying the teachings of Christ, than the child at his mother’s knee. I have been to your great cathedrals and churches. I saw only lip-service and routine. I heard only stale maxims, weak explanations of the allegories and parables that fill your Biblical records; flowing rhetoric and vague expressions of some undefinable joy and glory in an equally undefinable Hereafter, that was sometimes described as a place, and sometimes as a state. That was all. I feel such things cannot long stand against the tide of advancing thought. Modern Christianity is not the Sermon on the Mount, and has little title to the name of its founder. It has not a feather’s weight of importance in the minds of the worldly, the fashionable, the pleasure-seeking; its sentiment is extinct, save in a few faithful ignorant hearts, who adore what they cannot comprehend, and live in a state of hope that all will come right in some vague future.”

The beautiful eyes had grown sad and thoughtful. They rested on the eager wondering face before her, yet seemed to look through and beyond it, as the eyes of one who sees a vision that is mere airy nothingness to the surrounding crowd.

“It will come right,” she went on slowly and dreamily, “but not as men think, and not because the religion of earth teaches fear of punishment and hope of reward as the basis of spiritual faith. No. Something higher and holier and deeper than any motive of self-safety will perfect what is best in man and eliminate what is vile.”

“If that is so,” interposed Mrs Jefferson, glibly, as she rose from her chair to proceed to the Second Room—“I guess man will want a pretty long time to ‘perfect’ in. I don’t see how he’s going to do it here.”

“I did not say ‘here,’” answered the stranger, in her slow, calm way, as she, too, rose and prepared to follow the little American. “For what, think you, are the ages of Eternity intended?—sleep and dreams?”

Mrs Jefferson gave a little shudder. “I surmise we’re getting a little too deep,” she said. “Let’s keep to Gladstone and the Irish Question while the thermometer’s at 110.”