Young Wingfield looked at Katharine with an air of entreaty, as though hoping that she, at least, might understand what Mr. Griggs meant. She smiled as she saw his expression, and understood what was passing in his mind. She was supposed to have seen far more of Griggs during the preceding month than she really had, and she got credit for comprehending, at least, the general drift of his ideas, beyond what she deserved. Wingfield looked at her in vain, and then broke the silence which had followed Griggs’ last speech.

“I wish one knew what to believe,” he said, formulating the nineteenth century’s dying question. “It’s not easy, you know, with all these theories about.”

Of the seven persons present there was not one whose convictions really coincided, even approximately, with any established form of belief. Yet all belonged to some one of the few principal Christian churches, by birth, early associations and youthful teaching.

Wingfield’s question was received in silence. His bold black eyes glanced from one to another of his companions, and the blood mounted slowly in his healthy brown cheeks, for he was young enough to fancy that some of these might have thought his remark futile or trivial and he did not wish to seem dull before Katharine.

She found herself in a strange position. By a very natural train of circumstances she was accidentally set up as a sort of idol that evening before the five men who, of all others, each in his own way, most sincerely loved and admired her. Secretly married to the one of them she loved, two of the others—Hamilton Bright and Wingfield—wished to marry her. Of the other two, Crowdie, the painter, admired her more than any woman he had ever seen, though he was undoubtedly in love with his wife. Had she been able to understand his admiration, it would have repelled her. Fortunately it was beneath her understanding. And to Griggs, weather-beaten, overworked, disenchanted of all that the world held, by reason of having had much of it either too early or too late, with his hard head and his dreamy mind and his almost supernaturally strong hands—to Griggs she represented something he would not have told then, but something which Katharine need not have been ashamed to hear of, nor her husband to tolerate. Ralston might even have found sympathy for him.

They all worshipped her in one way or another, though she was a very human girl of her time and place in the world. And somehow, in the silence which followed Griggs’ speech, broken only by Wingfield’s questioning remark, they all turned to her as he had done, as though in her face they sought the lost faith. Hard-headed men, some of them, too, and hard-fisted. The three eldest had each accomplished something. The two younger ones were perhaps on the way. They were rather typical men.

Katharine was vaguely conscious of their glances, and was the first to speak, after Wingfield.

“It’s what we all feel—what half the people we know feel, though they haven’t the courage to say it.”

Wingfield looked at her gratefully, conscious that she had justified what he had feared had been a foolish observation.

“Katharine,” said Mrs. Bright, who had not spoken for a long time, “if you’re going to talk theology, I shall go to bed—like the baron in the Ingoldsby legends. ‘There are no windows to break, and they can’t get in’—do you remember? So he went to bed and slept soundly through the siege. It’s exactly the same with theology, my dear. It’s all been discussed a hundred thousand times, and yet nobody ever gets in. There’s only one religion the whole world over, and that is, to do the best one can and help other people—because no one can do better than the best he can, according to what he thinks right. And there’s a great deal in soap, my dear. I’m sure people feel like better people when they’re clean, and as people do what they feel, why, they really are better people. I’d like to try free soap in the State of New York for a year, and see whether it didn’t improve the criminal statistics.”

“It’s a splendid election cry, mother,” said Bright. “‘Soap—Something—and Stability.’ We’ll try it some day.”

“No, but there’s truth in it,” protested Mrs. Bright. “Isn’t there, Mr. Griggs?”

“Of course,” answered Griggs, gravely. “Every religion that ever existed has some rules of ablution. And there’s a lot of truth in the other things you said, Mrs. Bright. Only the trouble is, a code of action—what you call doing the best one can—doesn’t satisfy humanity. The average human being won’t do anything for its own sake. He must do it for his own advantage here—or hereafter, since people will insist on using that idiotic word.”

“Why idiotic?” asked Wingfield, very naturally.

“Hereafter means a future, and there isn’t any such thing, except in a small way, for matter-worlds and such little trifles, which go to pieces every two or three thousand million years.”

“Yes, but the soul—if we’ve got one.”

Wingfield added the last conditional expression rather sheepishly, as though he suspected that the highly intellectual beings amongst whom he found himself might have done away with such old-fashioned nonsense as the soul.

“Of course you’ve got a soul,” said Griggs, rather impatiently. “But if it’s a real soul, it has no weight and no size, and no shape and no colour, nor anything resembling matter—nor anything with which to resemble anything, except other souls. Well, of course you know that time is only conceivable in relation to matter in motion, so that where there isn’t any matter, there isn’t any time. And where there’s no time there can’t be portions of time, which are past, present, and future. So the soul has no time, doesn’t exist in relation to time, and consequently can’t be said to have a hereafter. The body has a hereafter—oh, yes—it’s absorbed into the elements and lives over again thousands of millions of times. But the soul hasn’t. It’s eternal. If it always is to be, as we say, comparing it to matter, why, then, it always was, by the same comparison. But the fact is, that ‘it is’—and there’s no more to be said. ‘It is,’ and as it’s indestructible, not being matter, by the hypothesis, nothing can be said of it in that respect except that ‘it is.’ You can’t say that an axiom, for instance, has a past, present, and future, can you? Well—if the soul’s anything, it’s axiomatic. There, I’ve bored you to death—shall I tear another pack of cards for you, or break silver dollars to amuse you? I’ll do anything I’m told, now that I’ve had my say.”

Griggs laughed quietly and crossed one leg over the other, as he looked at Katharine.

“You’re not a comforting person when one feels religious,” she said.

“No—by Jove!” exclaimed Bright. “You wouldn’t have converted the cowboys in the Nacimiento Valley, Griggs. They’d have tried their own idea of a hereafter on you—quick. That’s the trouble with all that metaphysical stuff, or whatever you call it—it doesn’t say anything to mankind—it only talks to professorkind. Unless a fellow’s passed a sort of higher standard in terminations, he hasn’t the ghost of a chance of spiritual comfort. He couldn’t understand the first word of what you talk about.”

“Did I use long words?” asked Griggs, blandly. “I thought I didn’t.”

“Well, not exactly long words. I don’t mean literally terminations. But you talk another language, somehow. I know I’m what they call an educated man, because I once learned some Latin and Greek at a sinful expense of time. But I can’t half follow you, even when you use good plain English. The policeman at the corner would march you off and clap you in the jug like a shot if you talked to him that way for five minutes. That is, unless you tied him up in a hard knot with those hands of yours, and set him down by the railings to cool. I wouldn’t try it, though. I suppose there’s a limit to the number of policemen you could strangle with each finger. No—joking apart—that sort of thing isn’t going to take the place of Christianity, you know—even as people like us look at what we call Christianity. You’ve got to have something to pray for and somebody to pray to, you know, after all.”

“Well,” answered Griggs, “there’s God to pray to and salvation to pray for.”

“Not in your system—without any future,” retorted Bright.

“Oh, yes, there is,” replied the other. “You seem to think I’m an atheist, or a freethinker, at least—though I can’t see why, I’m sure.”

“Why—because—” Bright stopped, trying to formulate his accusation.

Katharine laughed a little, and Wingfield looked from one to the other with a puzzled expression, as though he should have liked to understand better. Griggs proceeded to defend himself.

“Did I say that there was no soul?” he enquired. “On the contrary, I said that the soul was eternal. Did I say that there was no God? I said nothing about it. The soul is a part of God, and, therefore, since the part exists, the Whole, of which it is a part, exists also. It’s my belief, and, therefore, so far as I’m concerned, it’s fact. Belief is knowledge—the ultimate possible knowledge of every man at the moment of asking him what he believes. Did I deny that the soul is happy or unhappy according to its rule of itself? Not at all, though I didn’t try to explain the way in which it strikes me. You might not understand it. But I believe that its happiness or unhappiness is exactly inversely relative to the amount of alloy it gets from the things of which it is conscious. As I see them all in my own way, I believe all the articles of faith of my church, and I’m a Roman Catholic.”

“Well—I don’t see how you can,” said Bright, discontentedly.

“You’re our dear Buddhist!” put in Mrs. Bright, with a breadth of toleration peculiar to her, and becoming. “You’ve often told me the most delightful things about Buddhism, and I shall never think of you as anything but a Buddhist.”

“That’s a thoroughly logical position, mother!” laughed Bright. “Stick to it!”

“I can’t help it if my Christianity seems like Buddhism to you,” answered Griggs. “If you knew more about Buddhism, you’d see the difference very soon. But religion’s like love. It affects different people differently. It isn’t often that any two people see it in precisely the same light. When they do—”

He paused, interrupting himself. His tired eyes became suddenly dreamy, as he stared at the Persian embroidery that hung before the disused fireplace around which they were all sitting.

“What happens when they do?” asked Katharine.

“What happens, Miss Lauderdale? How should I know what happens when people who are in love see love in the same light? I’m an old bachelor, you know.” He laughed drily, being roused again.

“You’re right about one thing at all events,” said Crowdie. “It’s not often that two people love in the same way. There are five of us men here, about as radically different from each other as five men could be, I should think. It’s quite possible that we may all be more or less in love at the present moment. I’m willing to confess that I am. Don’t jump, Ham! I’m in love with my wife, and as we’re in the family I suppose I may say so, mayn’t I?”

“You needn’t be ashamed of loving Hester, my dear Walter!” cried Mrs. Bright.

Bright himself said nothing, but looked curiously at his brother-in-law, whom he disliked in an unaccountable way. He had never been able to understand Griggs’ apparent attachment to the man. He had heard that when Crowdie had been a young art student in Paris, twelve or fourteen years earlier, Griggs had nursed him through an illness, and had otherwise taken care of him. There was a mystery about it which Hamilton Bright had always wished to solve. According to him, the best thing about Crowdie was his friendship for the literary man. Bright could not fathom its mystery, any more than he could understand his sister’s passionate, all-devouring love for Crowdie. The husband and wife were almost inseparable. Such a state of things should have seemed admirable to the wife’s brother, but for some mysterious reason it did not. Bright had almost resented his sister’s ardent devotion to a man who seemed to him so unmanly. He always thought that Crowdie, with his soft, pale face and vividly red lips, was like a poisonous tropical flower that would ultimately harm Hester in some unimaginable way.

“No—I’m not ashamed of it,” said the painter, in answer to his mother-in-law’s remark. “But that isn’t the question. What I mean is, that we all love, or should love, in different ways—all five of us. Look at us—how different we are! There’s Griggs, now. I’ve known him half my life and a good bit of his. If he’s in love, he’s picked out a soul, and then a face, and then a set of ideas out of his extensive collection, and he’s sublimated the whole in that old retort of a brain of his, and he’s living on the perfume of the essence. Poor old Griggs!”

“Don’t pity me, and don’t patronize me, Crowdie!” laughed Griggs. “If you offend me, I’ll pay you off, you know.”

“I’m not frightened—but I’ve done with you. I’ll go on. There’s Ralston—he’s dangerous. He’d love like Othello, and lose his temper like Hotspur. As for Bright, he has permanent qualities. When he’s once made up his mind, it makes up him for the rest of his life. Faithful Johnnie, don’t you know? He’s a do or die sort of man—and with his constitution it means doing and not dying. Wingfield—oh, Wingfield’s Achilles. An Achilles with black hair—only rather more so. With his size, it’s lucky for the Trojans that he hasn’t got your Lauderdale temper that you’re always talking about. Schliemann wouldn’t even find the foundations of Troy. Wingfield would pulverize the whole place and use it up for polishing his weapons. Briseis, or nothing—while the mood lasts. I don’t mean to say that you’re fickle, Wingfield, but you’re much too human for an undying passion, you know.”

“How about yourself?” enquired young Wingfield. “We’ve each had our turn. Don’t forget yourself.”

“Oh—as for myself—I don’t know. I’ll leave that to you. You can all take your revenge, and define me, if you like. I’ll be patient. I’m not aggressive by nature. Besides, I’m quite different—I mustn’t be judged like you other men.”

“And why not?” enquired Katharine.

“Why—I’m an artist. The foundations of my nature are different from yours. I’m a skilled workman. It’s your business to be more or less skilled thinkers. I do things with my hands, you do things with your brains. The beginning of art is manual, mechanical skill. Any one who’s got it enough to be an artist must be something of a materialist. He can’t help it, any more than a surgeon can. What’s subject to you is object to me—so we can’t possibly look at the same things in the same way.”

“That’s why you’re such a confounded materialist!” exclaimed Griggs.

“Nonsense!” retorted Crowdie. “You’re always saying that matter’s an illusion and an idea. I’m the real idealist because I go in for matter, which is nothing but a dream, according to you.”

“Of all the consummately impertinent arguments!” laughed the man of letters. “You’re an arrant humbug, my dear Crowdie.”

“Since matter’s only humbug, I don’t mind,” rejoined the painter. “That’s unanswerable unless you throw up your theory—which you won’t, for I know you. So you’d better leave me and my art to do the best they can together.”

“It seems to me that Crowdie’s got rather the better of you,” observed Bright.

“Oh—he has. I always admit that the children of light haven’t a chance against the children of darkness.”

“That’s an argument ‘ad hominem,’” observed Crowdie. “It’s your way of throwing up the sponge.”

“Hit him again!” laughed Bright. “Turn the other theoretical cheek to the smiter, Griggs!”

“He’s afraid of me, all the same,” retorted Griggs. “These materialists are the most superstitious people alive. He believes that I learned all sorts of queer things in the East, and that I could roll up his shadow, like Peter Schlemil’s, and destroy his Totem, and generally make his life a burden to him by translating ‘The Owl and the Pussy Cat’ into Arabic, and pouring ink into my hand, and all that. You know you do.”

“Yes,” answered Crowdie. “I confess that I’m what you call superstitious. I’m inclined to believe in things like magic and spells—like John Wellington Wells. Since your matter’s all a dream, it can’t take much to blur it, and make it move about and change and behave oddly. Oh, yes—I believe in the spirits of the four elements, and all that—or if I don’t, I’d like to.”

“What good would it do you?” asked Wingfield, bluntly.

“Good? It isn’t a question of good, it’s a question of beauty. I want to believe that beautiful things have a consciousness and a sort of power of their own, a special perishable soul—the sort of soul that Lucretius talks about. I’m quite willing to think that they may have an immortal soul, too, but what concerns me is the perishable one, that suffers and enjoys and speaks in the eyes and sighs in the voice.”

Crowdie knew what he was talking about. In painting, his talent lay chiefly in expressing that perishable, passionate animation which is in every human face. And so far as the voice was concerned, his own was remarkable, and the few who ever heard him sing were almost inclined to ask whether he had not mistaken his vocation and erred in not becoming a public singer. It is not an uncommon thing to find painters who have beautiful voices. Gustave DorÉ, for instance, might have earned both reputation and fortune as a tenor.

“I’m afraid you’re an incorrigible heathen, Walter,” said Mrs. Bright. “I wonder you haven’t set up gods and goddesses all over your house—you and Hester—with little tripods before them, and garlands and perfumes—like Tadema’s pictures, you know.”

“You can’t symbolize matter, aunt Maggie,” laughed Crowdie. “If you do, you get entangled with the ideal again, and your symbol turns into an idol. The Greek statues were meant for portraits of gods and goddesses, not for symbols. So were the pictures and the images of the early church—portraits of divine and holy personages. The moment such things become symbols, there’s a revulsion, and they turn into idols.”

“That’s a profound thought, Crowdie,” said Griggs. “I don’t believe you ever hit on it by yourself.”

“Well—it’s in my consciousness, anyhow, and I don’t know where it comes from,” answered the painter. “I suppose it’s part of my set of ideas about matter.”

“It all seems to me very abstruse,” said Wingfield, who was considerably bored by the discussion, to Katharine, who was listening.

“No,” she answered, quickly. “I like it. It interests me.”

She had only glanced at him, but she had realized at once that he was still wholly occupied with herself. There was a wistful, longing regret in his black eyes just then which she understood well enough. She was sincerely sorry for him, and would have done anything reasonable in her power to comfort him. As he turned from her she looked at him again with an expression which might have been interpreted to mean an affectionate pity, though she had certainly never got so far as to feel anything approaching to affection for the magnificent youth. Almost immediately she was conscious that both Ralston and Bright were watching her during the momentary pause in the conversation.

“Why are you both looking at me like that?” she asked, innocently glancing from one to the other.

“Oh—nothing!” answered Bright, colouring suddenly and turning his eyes away. “I didn’t know I was staring.”

Ralston said nothing in reply to her question, but transferred his gaze from her to Wingfield, with something not unlike envy in his look. Few men could look at Wingfield without feeling a little envious of his outward being, and Ralston was a man singularly devoid of personal vanity, like his mother.

“I wish I could paint you all!” exclaimed Crowdie, suddenly.

“That’s a large order,” observed Bright, with a smile.

“You’ve all got such lots in your faces to-night,” continued the artist, with an odd enthusiasm. “There must be something in the air—well, that doesn’t mean anything, of course—but it’s very strange.”

“What’s strange?” asked Katharine.

“Oh—I can’t exactly explain. There’s an unusual air about us all, as though we were under pressure and rather inclined to do eccentric things. I could paint it, but I can’t possibly put it in words.”

“I suppose I’m not sensitive,” said Wingfield to Katharine. “I don’t notice anything particular, do you? At least—not outside, you know,” he added, quickly, being all at once conscious of something he had not been aware of a moment earlier.

“I know what he means,” answered Katharine. “I feel it myself. But then—I’m tired and I suppose I’m nervous.”

“There’s a queer, mythological atmosphere about,” Crowdie was saying.

“It’s what we’ve been talking about,” said Mrs. Bright. “We’re all so completely mixed on the subject of time and space and things like that, that we’re just ready to believe in ghosts, and turn tables, and make idiots of ourselves.”

“What a barbarian you are, aunt Maggie!” cried Crowdie, looking round at his mother-in-law. “You’d take the poetry out of the Nine Muses. Not that I meant anything poetical. It’s much more a sort of creepy, dreamy, undefinable sensation. Yes—perhaps you’re right after all. I shouldn’t be surprised if one of us saw a ghost to-night.”

“What will you bet?” enquired Ham, with the slow, western emphasis he could assume when he chose.

“You’re insufferable!” exclaimed Crowdie. “Fancy betting on seeing ghosts! You’re worse than aunt Maggie. The only man who understands me is Griggs. Griggs, you do understand, don’t you?”

There was something petulant and almost womanish in his tone, which struck all four men disagreeably, though perhaps none of them could or would have told why.

“Don’t talk!” answered Griggs. “When you want people to understand you, paint or sing. You only make a mess of it when you try to explain what you feel in English. You’re a good painter and you sing like an angel, but you’re a bad talker.”

“That’s said because I got the better of you in talking just now,” retorted Crowdie, who did not seem in the least annoyed.

“Oh, don’t begin sparring again, for heaven’s sake!” exclaimed Bright. “Cousin Katharine’s tired to death of hearing you two fighting. Sing something, Walter. It’s much better.”

“Oh, no!” answered Crowdie. “Oh, no! I can’t sing, thank you. I never sing at parties—as they call it.”

“You don’t call this a party, do you?” enquired Bright. “Don’t be silly. We all want to hear you. You’re not the common amateur who has to be begged and flattered and cajoled, and praised afterwards. You can sing when you choose, and we all want you to.”

“No. I’d rather not,” said the painter, with a change of tone, as though he were very much in earnest.

“I wish you would!” Katharine, for the moment, really longed to hear the wonderful voice.

“Do you?” asked Crowdie.

There was a hesitation in his tone which suggested the idea that he had perhaps been waiting for Katharine to ask him, in order to yield to the request. Instantly the young girl was aware that the eyes of Ralston and Bright were upon her. Griggs had turned his head and was watching Crowdie curiously. Mrs. Bright looked at him, too, hesitated, and then spoke.

“I really think that promise you made Hester was too absurd, Walter!” she said.

“What promise?” asked Katharine, quickly.

“Not to sing for any one but her,” said Mrs. Bright, before Crowdie could interrupt her. “Hester told me.”

Everybody looked at Crowdie and smiled at the sentimentality. His soft eyes glanced disagreeably at his mother-in-law for a moment, and the smile on his red lips did not conceal his annoyance.

“Besides,” continued Mrs. Bright, “if Katharine asks you, I think you might—really, it’s too silly of Hester.”

“Oh!” exclaimed Katharine, “I don’t want you to break any promise, Mr. Crowdie—especially one you’ve made to Hester. She’d never forgive me. Please don’t sing—some time when she’s here—perhaps—”

But at once she again felt Ralston’s glance and Bright’s. She wondered why they looked at her so often.

“Well then, it isn’t Katharine who asks you,” said Mrs. Bright. “I do. I’ll be responsible to Hester. I know she won’t mind, if it’s for me. Now, Walter, do! Just to please me!”

Crowdie said nothing. He turned his eyes upon her and then to Katharine’s face. But, feeling uncomfortably as though she were being watched for some reason which she could not understand, Katharine was looking down, nervously pulling at a thread in the lace which covered her right arm.

Wingfield was sitting on one side of her, in one of those naturally graceful attitudes which athletes assume without thought or care, one elbow on his knee as he bent forward, supporting his chin upon his in-turned hand, his resolute young face turned towards Crowdie, his black eyes somewhat sad and shadowy. On Katharine’s other side sat Ralston, nervous, moody, ready to spring, as it were, for he had not yet recovered from his anger at what had been said about secret marriages. Next to him was Bright, upright in his straight-backed chair, his heavy arms folded on his full chest, his round head thrown back, his clear blue eyes fixed on Katharine’s face.

As she looked up again, she had a strong impression of being surrounded by splendid wild animals. Wingfield was the tiger, colossally lithe, brown, black, and golden; Ralston the panther, less in strength, but lighter to spring, quicker to see, perhaps more cruel; Bright the lion, fair, massive, dominant, silent in his strength. Griggs was a wolf, grey, old, tough, destined to die hard some day without a cry. And Crowdie—with his woman’s eyes, his soft, clear voice, his delicate white hands, his repellent pallor, and wound-like lips—Katharine thought of neither man nor beast. Even in the midst of her dream of wild animals, he was Crowdie still, with a mysterious, indescribable, poisonous something in all his being which made it a suffering for her to touch his hand. To this something, whatever it might be, she preferred her father’s cruel avarice, her mother’s envy, heartless as it had been while it lasted. To it she would have preferred a drunkard’s trembling hand and lip. John Ralston’s ungovernable temper was immeasurably preferable to that, or her sister’s mean pride and petty vanity. There was no weakness or sin, scarcely any crime of which her maiden heart had dreamed with horror, which she would not have met and faced and seen in its bare ugliness, rather than that unknown something of which the existence was a certainty when Crowdie was near her.

In the dead silence of the moment the very faintest sound would have been loud. Whether they admitted it or not, they were none of them just then in a natural or normal state of nerves, except perhaps Mrs. Bright, whose supernal calm was not easily disturbed. Each one of the five men was thinking in his own way of Katharine, and of all she might be to him. The great passion was there, five-fold, and it made itself felt in the very air of the quiet room.

Then a soft vibration, as of a soul far off, murmuring to itself, just trembled and felt its way amongst them, like the promise of a caress. And again it came, more strongly, more clear, floating in the soft air and taking life in it, and stealing to the heart with a tender, backward-reaching regret, with a low, passionate looking forward to things of love yet to come.

Crowdie was singing. He had not changed his position as he sat in his chair, and he had scarcely raised his face. There was no effort, no outward striving for art, no searching for effect. The notes floated from his lips as though he thought them rather than as though they were produced by any human means, rising, sinking, with ever varying colour, tone, and meaning, ringing, as he sang, like an angel’s clarion tones, sighing, as he breathed them, like the whole world’s love-dream.

Then time, too, sank away into dreamland. Before Katharine’s closed eyes rose Lohengrin, silver-armed—floated the mystic swan—clashed the clanging swords. And then, moonbeams, the passionate, great, spell-ruled love—the question and its horror of endless parting—the rush of the destroyers to the bridal chamber, the last, the very last farewell, and out through the misty portals of the dream floated again the fatal, lordly swan, with arching neck, bearing away, spirit-like, the last breath of love from Elsa’s life.

None of them could have told how long he sang, for time was away in dreamland, and passion’s weary eyes drooped and saw not the pain.