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192 explorers may discover anything and we shall not believe. It is easy to prophesy as you have been doing all this meal-time — it is popular once more to shout the malignant 'Crucify' — but events will show you how utterly wrong you are in your estimate of the Christian character." They all stared at the chaplain. His sudden vigorous outburst, the harsh, unlovely voice, the contempt in it, was almost stupefying at first.

Indeed, though they had certainly no cue from Sir Michael, they had regarded the silent, rather forbidding priest, in his cassock and robe, a dress which typified his reserve and detachment from all their interests, in the light of an upper servant, almost. Nor was it so much his interference they resented as his manner of interfering. The supreme confidence of the man galled them; it was patronising in its strength.

Mrs. Armstrong heard the outburst with a slight frown of displeasure, which, as the priest continued, changed into a smile of kindly tolerance, the attitude of a housemaid who spares a spider. She remembered that, after all, her duty lay in being kind to those of less power than herself. The speech touched Schuabe more nearly. He seemed to hear a familiar echo of a voice he hated and feared. There was something chilling in these men who drew a confidence and certainty, sublime in its immobility, from the Unseen. He felt, as he had felt before, the hated barrier which he could in no wise pass, this calm fanaticism which would not even listen to him, which was beyond his influence. The bitter hate which welled up in his heart, the terrible scorn which he had to repress at these insults to his evil and devilish egoism, gave him almost a sense of physical nausea. His pale face became pallid, but he showed no other sign of the