A few days later the brief holiday ended, and father and daughter were both hard at work again in London. They had crossed from Antwerp by night and had reached home about ten o'clock to find the usual busy life awaiting them.

Tom and Aunt Jean, who had been very dull in their absence, were delighted to have them back again; and though the air was thick with coming troubles, yet it was nevertheless a real home coming, while Erica, in spite of her hidden sorrow, had a very real enjoyment in describing her first foreign tour. They were making a late breakfast while she talked, Raeburn being more or less absorbed in the “Daily Review.”

“You see, such an early newspaper is a luxury now,” said Erica. “Not that he's been behaving well abroad. He promised me when we started that he'd eschew newspapers altogether and give his brain an entire rest; but there is a beguiling reading room at Florence, and there was no keeping him away from it.”

“What's that? What are you saying?” said Raeburn, absently.

“That very soon, father, you will be as absent-minded as King Stars-and-Garters in the fairy tale, who one day, in a fit of abstraction, buttered his newspaper and tried to read his toast.”

Raeburn laughed and threw down the “Daily Review.”

“Saucier than ever, isn't she, Tom? Well, we've come back to a few disagreeables; but then we've come back, thank man! To roast beef and Turkey towels, and after kickshaws and table napkins, one knows how to appreciate such things.”

“We could have done with your kickshaws here,” said Tom. “If you hadn't come back soon, Erica, I should have gone to the bad altogether, for home life, with the cook to cater for one, is intolerable. That creature has only two ideas in her head. We rang the changes on rice and stewed rhubarb. The rhubarb in its oldest stage came up four days running. We called it the widow's curse! Then the servants would make a point of eating onions for supper so that the house was insufferable. And at last we were driven from pillar to post by a dreadful process called house cleaning in which, undoubtedly, life is not worth living. In the end, Mr. Osmond took pity on me and lent me Brian's study. Imagine heretical writings emanating from that room!”

This led the conversation round to Brian's visit to Florence, and Erica was not sorry to be interrupted by a note from Mr. Bircham, requesting her to write an article on the Kilbeggan murder. She found that the wheels of the household machinery would need a good deal of attention before they would move as smoothly as she generally contrived to make them. Things had somehow “got to wrongs” in her absence. And when at length she thought everything was in train and had got thoroughly into the spirit of a descriptive article on the Irish tragedy, the cook of two ideas interrupted her with what seemed, in contract, the most trivial matters.

“If you please, miss,” she said, coming into the green room, just as the three villains in black masks were in the act of killing their victim, “I thought you'd wish to know that we are wanting a new set of kitchen cloths; and if you'll excuse me mentioning it, miss, there's Jane, miss, using glass cloths as tea cloths, and dusters as knife cloths.”

Erica looked slightly distracted, but diverted her mind from the state of Ireland to the state of the household linen, and, when left alone once more, laughed to herself at the incongruity of the two subjects.

It was nearly a fortnight before Brian returned from Switzerland. Erica knew that he was in the well-known house on the opposite side of the square, and through the trees in the garden, they could see each the other's place of residence. It was a sort of nineteenth-century version of the Rhine legend, in which the knight of Rolandseek looked down upon Nomenwerth where his lady love was immured in a convent.

She had rather dreaded the first meeting, but, when it came, she felt nothing of what she had feared. She was in the habit of going on Sunday morning to the eight o'clock service at the church in the square. It was nearer than Charles Osmond's church, and the hour interfered less with household arrangements. Just at the corner of the square on the morning of Trinity Sunday, she met Brian. Her heart beat quickly as she shook hands with him, but there was something in his bearing which set her entirely at her ease after just the first minute. He looked much older, and a certain restlessness in look and manner had quite left him, giving place to a peculiar calm not unlike his father's expression. It was the expression which a man wears when he has lost the desire of his heart, yet manfully struggles on, allowing no bitterness to steal in, facing unflinchingly the grayness of a crippled life. Somehow, joining in that thanksgiving service seemed to give them the true key-note for their divided lives. As they came out into the porch, he asked her a question.

“It is Whittier, I know,” said Erica, promptly; “and I think it is in a poem called 'Trinitas.' Come home with me, and we will hunt for it.”

So they walked back together silently, and found the poem, and at Raeburn's request Brian stayed to breakfast, and fell back naturally into his old place with them all.

The following day Raeburn had to attend a meeting in the north of England; he returned on the Tuesday afternoon, looking, Erica fancied, tired and overdone.

“Railway journeys are not quite the rest they once were to me,” he confessed, throwing himself down in a chair by the open window while she brought him some tea. “This is very beguiling, little one; but see, I've all these letters to answer before five.”

“Your train must have been very late.”

“Yes, there was a block on the line, and we stopped for half an hour in the middle of a bean field bliss that a Londoner can't often enjoy.”

“Did you get out?”

“Oh, yes, and sat upon the fence and meditated to the great delectation of my olfactory nerves.”

Erica's laugh was checked by a knock at the door. The servant announced that a gentleman wanted to see Miss Raeburn.

“Some message from Mr. Bircham, I expect,” said Erica to her father. “Ask him upstairs, please. I only hope he doesn't want me to write another article at the eleventh hour. If it's the little Irish sub-editor, you must be very polite to him, father, for he has been kind to me.”

But it was no message from the “Daily Review” office; a perfect stranger was shown into the room.

He bowed slightly as he entered.

“Are you Miss Erica Raeburn?” he asked, coming toward her.

“I am,” she replied. “What is your business with me?”

“I have to place this document in your hands.”

He gave her a paper which she rapidly unfolded. To her dying day she could always see that hateful bit of foolscap with its alternate printing and writing. The words were to this effect:

Writ Subpoena Ad Test, at Sittings of High Court. IN THE HIGH COURT OF JUSTICE, QUEEN'S BENCH DIVISION. Between Luke Raeburn, Plaintiff, and William Henry Pogson, Defendant VICTORIA, by the Grace of God, of the United kingdom of Great Britain and Ireland, Queen, Defender of the Faith, To Erica Raeburn, greeting. We command you to attend at the sittings of the Queen's Bench division of our High Court of Justice to be holden at Westminster on Tuesday, the Twentieth day of June, 18__, at the hour of half past Ten in the forenoon, and so from day to day during the said sittings, until the above cause is tried, to give evidence on behalf of the Defendant. Witness, etc., etc.

Erica read the paper twice before she looked up; she had grown white to the very lips. Raeburn, recognizing the form of a subpoena, came hastily forward, and in the merest glance saw how matters were. By no possibility could the most malicious of opponents have selected a surer means of torturing him.

“Is this legal?” asked Erica, lifting to him eyes that flashed with righteous indignation.

“Oh, it is legal,” he replied bitterly “the pound of flesh was legal. A wife need not appear against her husband, but a daughter may be dragged into court and forced to give evidence against her father.”

As he spoke, such anger flashed from his eyes that the clerk shivered all down his backbone. He thought he would take his departure as quickly as might be, and drawing a little nearer, put down a coin upon the table beside Erica.

“This fee is to cover your expenses, madame,” he said.

“What!” exclaimed Erica, her anger leaping up into a sudden flame, “do you think I shall take money from that man?”

She had an insane desire to snatch up the sovereign and fling it at the clerk's head, but restraining herself merely flicked it back across the table to him, just touching it with the back of her hand as though it had been polluted.

“You can take that back again,” she said, a look of scorn sweeping over her face. “Tell Mr. Pogson that, when he martyrs people he need not say: 'The martyrdom will make you hungry here is luncheon money,' or 'The torture will tire you here is your cab fare!'”

“But, madame, excuse me,” said the clerk, looking much embarrassed. “I must leave the money, I am bound to leave it.”

“If you leave it, I shall just throw it into the fireplace before your eyes,” said Erica. “But if indeed it can't be sent back, then give it to the first gutter child you meet do anything you like with it! Hang it on your watch chain as a memento of the most cruel case your firm every had to do with!”

Her color had come back again, her cheeks were glowing, in her wrath she looked most beautiful; the clerk would have been less than human if he had not felt sorry for her. There was a moment's silence; he glanced from the daughter to the father, whose face was still pale and rigid. A great pity surged up in the clerk's heart. He was a father himself; involuntarily his thoughts turned to the little home at Kilburn where Mary and Kitty would be waiting for him that evening. What if they should ever be forced into a witness box to confirm a libel on his personal character? A sort of moisture came to his eyes at the bare idea. The counsel for the defense, too, was that Cringer, Q. C., the greatest bully that ever wore silk. Then he glanced once more at the silent, majestic figure with the rigid face, who, though an atheist, was yet a man and a father.

“Sir,” he said, with the ring of real and deep feeling in his voice, “sir, believe me, if I had known what bringing this subpoena meant, I would sooner have lost my situation!”

Raeburn's face relaxed; he spoke a few courteous, dignified words, accepting with a sort of unspoken gratitude the man's regret, and in a few moments dismissing him. But even in these few moments the clerk, though by no means an impressionable man, had felt the spell, the strange power of fascination which Raeburn invariably exercised upon those he talked with that inexplicable influence which made cautious, hard-headed mechanics ready to die for him, ready to risk anything in his cause.

The instant the man was gone, Raeburn sat down at Erica's writing table and began to answer his letters. His correspondents got very curt answers that day. Erica could tell by the sound of his pan how sharp were the down strokes, how short the rapidly written sentences.

“Can I help you?” she asked, drawing nearer to him.

He hastily selected two or three letters not bearing on his anti-religious work, gave her directions, then plunged his pen in the ink once more, and went on writing at lightning speed. When at length the most necessary ones were done, he pushed back his chair, and getting up began to pace rapidly to and fro. Presently he paused and leaned against the mantel piece, his face half shaded by his hand.

Erica stole up to him silently.

“Sometimes, Eric,” he said abruptly, “I feel the need of the word 'DEVIL!' My vocabulary has nothing strong enough for that man.”

She was too heartsick to speak; she drew closer to him with a mute caress.

“Eric!” he said, holding her hands between his, and looking down at her with an indescribably eager expression in his eyes, “Eric, surely NOW you see that this persecuting religion, this religion which has been persecuting innumerable people for hundreds of years, is false, worthless, rotten to the core. Child! Child! Surely you can't believe in a God whose followers try to promote His glory by sheer brutality like this?”

It was the first time he had spoken to her on this subject since their interview at Codrington. They had resolved never to touch upon it again; but a sort of consciousness that some good must come to him through this new bitterness, a hope that it must and would reconvince his child, impelled Raeburn to break his resolution.

“I could sooner doubt that you are standing here, father, with your arm round me,” said Erica, “than I could doubt the presence of your Father and mine the All-Father.”

“Even though his followers are such lying scoundrels as that Pogson? What do you make of that? What do you think of that?”

“I think,” she replied quietly, “that my father is too just a man to judge Christianity by the very worst specimen of a Christian to be met with. Any one who does not judge secularism by its very best representatives, dead or living, is unfair and what is unfair in one case is unfair in another.”

“Well, if I judged it by you, perhaps I might take a different view of it,” said Raeburn. “But then you had the advantage of some years of secularism.”

“Not by me!” cried Erica. “How can it seem anything but very faulty when you judge it only by faulty people? Why not judge it by the life and character of Christ?”

Raeburn turned away with a gesture of impatience.

“A myth! A poetic creation long ago distorted out of its true proportions! There, child, I see we must stop. I only pain you and torture myself by arguing the question.”

“One more thing,” said Erica, “before we go back to the old silence. Father, if you would only write a life of Christ I mean, a really complete life; the one you wrote years ago was scarcely more than a pamphlet.”

He smiled, knowing that she thought the deep study necessary for such an undertaking would lead to a change in his views.

“My dear,” he said, “perhaps I would; but just see how I am overdone. I couldn't write an elaborate thing now. Besides, there is the book on the Pentateuch not half finished though it was promised months ago. Perhaps a year or two hence when Pogson gives me time to draw a long breath, I'll attempt it; but I have an idea that one or other of us will have to be 'kilt intirely' before that happy time arrives. Perhaps we shall mutually do for each other, and reenact the historical song.” And, with laughter in his eyes, he repeated:

“There once were two cats of Kilkenny, Each thought there was one cat too many, So they quarreled and spit, and they scratched and they bit, Till, excepting their nails and the tips of their tails, Instead of two cats, there weren't any.”

Erica smiled faintly, but sighed the next minute.

“Well, there! It's too grave a matter to jest about,” said Raeburn. “Oh, bairn! If I could but save you from that brute's malice, I should care very little for the rest.”

“Since you only care about it for my sake, and I only for yours, I think we may as well give up caring at all,” said Erica, looking up at him with a brave smile. “And, after all, Mr. Cringer, Q. C. can only keep me in purgatory for a few hours at the outside. Don't you think, too, that such a cruel thing will damage Mr. Pogson in the eyes of the jury?”

“Unfortunately, dear, juries are seldom inclined to show any delicate considerateness to an atheist,” said Raeburn.

And Erica knew that he spoke truly enough.

No more was said just then. Raeburn began rapidly to run through his remaining correspondence a truly miscellaneous collection. Legal letters, political letters, business letters requests for his autograph, for his help, for his advice a challenge from a Presbyterian minister in the north of Scotland to meet him in debate; the like from a Unitarian in Norfolk; a coffin and some insulting verses in a match box, and lastly an abrasive letter from a clergyman, holding him responsible for some articles by Mr. Masterman, which he had nothing whatever to do with, and of which he in fact disapproved.

“What would they think, Eric, if I insisted on holding the Bishop of London responsible for every utterance of every Christian in the diocese?” said Raeburn.

“They would think you were a fool,” said Erica, cutting the coffin into little bits as she spoke.

Raeburn smiled and penciled a word or two on the letter the pith of a stinging reply.