is useless and he stops struggling. You admire him for that?"

Barnaby was startled at evidence of the extent to which Ashgrave had read Craig's character, and yet quick to see that he had, at least in his analysis, missed what to himself seemed the central point. As he spoke, the sense that Ashgrave had really read the clergyman faded, and he began to give him credit for merely a superficial clearness of characterisation.

"He has surrendered, yes; but not to a power he could not resist, but to the power to which the loyalty of righteousness is due. It was not because he was powerless to make the fight, but because under his conception it is wrong- useless."

"His conception! He has no conception. Something has made him what he is; that is, utterly incapable of a conception other than that of submission, and he submits. There's no virtue in it, there's no merit. He can no more help himself than I can help desire; than I can avoid lusting after a woman. If there is virtue in his surrender, why is mine sin?"

"Because his is righteous and yours unrighteous."

"Bosh, bosh, bosh! Why is it right for him to follow his nature? Because it is right. Why is it wrong for me to follow my nature? Because it is wrong. That's the whole of your argument, which you bundle up in a lot of big words to make it look as if it meant something. Strip it bare, and it's the veriest, scrawniest weakling that a brain ever laboured to bring forth. We've got into the world somehow, and when we demand to know why we 're here, one set of men say, 'to save your soul,' and everything that they think will do that is right, everything else is wrong. My body says 'to bring others into being, just as every other created thing does when

it is healthful and normal': and Craig and his kind yell, 'oh, that 's sin!' Why is it sin? Because it is n't right. There you have the whole argument!"

"But there must be something to guide us in our living and doing in this world," exclaimed Barnaby.

"Well? Why should it be any more what his nature dictates than what mine does?"

"If you won't let a fellow go back to authority," said Barnaby, "I see no anwer excepting that the difference is whether one seeks the best for all or merely one's own gratification at the expense of others."

"That's a better answer than you ever found at a theological school," asserted Ashgrave. "But when you've turned and twisted and doubled and dodged, you'll sneak back to some arbitrary power as the only thing that's left you. We 've nothing to do with being here; we 've nothing to do with what we do while we are here. We 've simply got to stand and take it. The result of one line of action is heaven, that of another, hell. One man comes here foreordained to one line of action, and he goes to hell; another comes fitted for heaven, and he acts accordingly. So that hell may begin at once, we are given knowledge?"

"And knowledge makes it heaven already for the other fellow?"

"Not a bit of it! God and the world never give a blessing where a curse will answer!"

Barnaby was aghast at such a philosophy from such a source. Craig? Certainly. He was of the ascetic religious cast of mind which under other surroundings would have made him capable of the deeds of a Brébeuf, an Alva, or a St. Simeon Stylites; but here was a man, reckless in his living, passionate of nature, sensual to the verge of the bestial, and yet fulfilled with this sense

of the absolute dominance of a power not himself, that permeates every phase of life till it makes life and conduct merely an emanation of the creative and governing force. It was the doctrine of despair, sublimated to the absolute obliteration of self. Before he could shape his mind to comprehension, Ashgrave was speaking again, pacing up and down in front of him, where he lay on the grass, like a caged tiger before his bars.

"You're thinking of the difference between Craig and me. It's just here. He knows—and submits. I know - and kick. I know that resistance is the most senseless, useless act imaginable, and I plunge in all the same. I'm predestined for hell, and know it. He knows and submits. He is predestined for heaven, and knows that also."

"Ah," said Barnaby, catching at the first flaw that invited, "there you are wrong. He does not even accept his own salvation as assured."

"What!" gasped Ashgrave.

"Just what I say. He believes that God may, after all, send him to hell finally. His attitude is that of having no concern in the matter. God has said, 'Do

this,' and he does it, not to save his soul, but because God has commanded it. There is no merit in the act, because it is God's command, which he is bound to obey, and therefore for obeying it there is no reward. If he is saved, that will be an act of God, purely of grace, not of right, done out of the plentitude of God's mercy, and in no way affected by what Craig himself has or has not done in this world."

"Well," said Ashgrave, almost with a gasp as of lost breath, "I'll be damned!"

After a pause, he added in a tone rather of admiration than otherwise:

"He's got more of the sense of things than I guessed."

"I tell you," exclaimed Barnaby hotly, "it's all a ghastly lie! If that were the kind of world we 're living in, there'd be no need of dying to go to hell. We'd be there already."

"There is n't any need," said Ashgrave grimly.

CHAPTER XII

BARNABY

A NIGHT VISION

ARNABY was oppressed with a feeling of having had a glimpse into the deeper blacknesses, where thoughts find being that it is almost a sin to bring to birth. He was haunted, too, by a belief of some more intimate relations between Miss Seagrave and Ashgrave than any of which he had actual evidence, unless he was to find it in her taking shelter from the storm in the old farmhouse and remaining there when he left.

Yet, when he came to look at this fact with cool judgment, it seemed absolutely stripped of meaning. They had grown up as boy and girl together, they had always been close neighbours under the unconventional conditions of country life, and he had seen nothing which could not have found explanation in these two facts, had it not been for the individuality of the two actors in the drama, of which there stood, as facts of illumination, that impress of sorrow which the girl's face had had for him, and now this strain of pessimistic fatality in Ashgrave which his visit had revealed.

Ashgrave, when Barnaby left him, rose from the grass, where he had finally thrown himself, and stretched like a great animal that is testing its muscles. He had not asked Barnaby into the house, and he had made excuse to himself that the summer evening was far pleasanter out of doors. He wished now that he had given the invitation and left it to Barnaby to make the excuse, if he cared. Aside from a half-grown boy now and then,