Page:Phillpotts - The Grey Room (Macmillan, 1921).djvu/161

148 environment for ever; and to me the appointed task is allotted. So I believe, as firmly as I believe in the death and resurrection of the Lord. Is that clear to you, Sir Walter?"

"It is. You have made it convincingly clear."

"So be it, then. I, too, Mary, am not dead to the meaning of science in its proper place. We may take an illustration of what I have told you from astronomy. As comets enter our system from realms of which we have no knowledge, dazzle us a little, awaken our speculations and then depart, so may certain immortal spirits also be supposed to act. We entangle them possibly in our gross air and detain them for centuries, or moments, until their Creator's purpose in sending them is accomplished. Then He takes the means to liberate them and set them on their eternal roads and to their eternal tasks once more."

The listening woman, almost against her reason, felt herself beginning to share these assumptions. But that they were fantastic, unsupported by any human knowledge, and would presently involve an experiment full of awful peril to the life of the man who uttered them, she also perceived. Yet her reasonable caution and conventional distrust began to give way a little under the priest's magnetic voice, his flaming eyes, his positive and triumphant certainty of truth. He burned with his inspiration, and she felt herself powerless to oppose any argument founded on facts against the mystic enthusiasm of such religious faith. His honesty and fervor could not, however, abate