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Rh next three years were to him the story of the sorrow and the illness of Mrs. Telles. His parents thought he was in love with her; he and she knew better. It was a great friendship. It was on his part a great agony to comfort her. He blamed himself intensely that his friend had died without any religious help. He would fain have brought some hope to the widow. But soon he realised—bit by bit was forced to realise—that he might as well read Shakespeare to a Red Indian as talk religion to this cultured Englishwoman. It never even dawned upon her that there could by any possibility be any rational side to Christianity. She had learnt it in early life in a form which made it quite incredible to her and had thenceforth shut it out for ever from her mind. Their worlds of thought were miles asunder. He would have had far more in common with a Chinaman or a Hindoo. For three years he studied, he prayed, he devoted himself to Mrs. Telles and then she died; glad, she said, unutterably glad, that it was all over. This long absorption had no doubt kept him from public life and from marriage. Indeed, at the latter part of it he was almost a sick-nurse.

This experience gave a bent to his activities which they would not naturally have had. As some men who have been thrown across physical horrors give up their whole lives to the struggle to diminish, however little, the misery they have seen, George Sutcliffe, after his friendship with Mrs. Telles, threw himself heart and soul into the controversies between the Christian ethics and the pagan. He was haunted by her three years' agony; he had sounded the depths of a soul without hope in this world or the next. And he found his co-religionists immensely blind to what he wanted them to do. He wanted them to understand that there was a world of thought, and of thinkers, almost unknown to them as they sat at home at ease in faith and plenty. He wanted them to understand how the