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hard eyes. “I am a cad who has played a crooked trick on a quiet village and a decent woman for a private reason of his own. I might have played it successfully on any other woman; I have hit the one woman on whom it cannot be played. It’s just like my damned luck. The plain truth is,” and here when he came to the plain truth he boggled and blundered as Evan had done in telling it to the girl in the motor-car.

“The plain truth is,” he said at last, “that I am James Turnbull the atheist. The police are after me; not for atheism but for being ready to fight for it.”

“I saw something about you in a newspaper,” said the girl, with a simplicity which even surprise could never throw off its balance.

“Evan MacIan said there was a God,” went on the other, stubbornly, “and I say there isn’t. And I have come to fight for the fact that there is no God; it is for that that I have seen this cursed island and your blessed face.”

“You want me really to believe,” said Madeleine, with parted lips, “that you think——”

“I want you to hate me!” cried Turnbull, in agony. “I want you to be sick when you think of my name. I am sure there is no God.”