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accepted an ultimate defeat. He had expected the angels to despise him if he were wrong, but not to despise him so much as this.

“You see,” said the stumbling spokesman, “I was angry with him when he insulted the Mother of God, and I asked him to fight a duel with me; but the police are all trying to stop it.”

Nothing seemed to waver or flicker in the fair young falcon profile; and it only opened its lips to say, after a silence: “I thought people in our time were supposed to respect each other’s religion.”

Under the shadow of that arrogant face MacIan could only fall back on the obvious answer: “But what about a man’s irreligion?” The face only answered: “Well, you ought to be more broadminded.”

If any one else in the world had said the words, MacIan would have snorted with his equine neigh of scorn. But in this case he seemed knocked down by a superior simplicity, as if his eccentric attitude were rebuked by the innocence of a child. He could not dissociate anything that this woman said or did or wore from an idea of spiritual rarity and virtue. Like most others under the same elemental passion, his soul was at present soaked