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226 at religion that is the thing you mean. I am afraid you don't understand anything about the other—yet." "I understand that you are the sweetest and truest soul I have ever known." He came back; kneeling a knee on the window-sill and leaning to her. "I will take you for my religion and my conscience and my God if you will. But I won't take any other. I don't want any other. Why should I? If God made this world then He did not make such a pure and beautiful thing that I should want to love and worship Him because of it."

"But don't you see that it is you and unbelievers like you who take the purity and beauty out of it? And then you blame God."

"He should not have allowed the devil to be too strong for us, then."

"It is you who have allowed that"

"Please don't begin a theological discussion. I am not up in all the cant phrases—I beg your pardon again, but—I wonder if you realise what you are doing with me. We are not children, to be frightened by the bugbears of devils or gods. We are simply man and woman, with our own problems to meet and our own doubts to conquer. It is natural that you should be afraid of this step at first. But no religion, no philosophy, no metaphysics can prove to us that there is a God or another world but this. Our nature is our strongest and most relentless guide. Why shouldn't we follow it? For we have no other."

"We have. Oh, we have." She put her hand on his shoulder. "You can't do it, Dick. If you kill my belief you kill me. It is me. I could not live without it—not even with you."

"My God—if you'd only try it," he said. But before her face his eager eyes dropped, and he sat still, biting his lips and frowning at the dark wall beyond the window.

Jennifer twisted her hands together. She knew that he was recognising acutely this hidden force that was ranged against him, and that the whole of his manhood's assertive will was in revolt at it.

"You are wilfully blinding yourself," he said at last. "You don't realise that religion is and always has been the most selfish thing conceivable. You are showing me the brutality and mercilessness of religion now. You have