Meantime, a sunken-eyed Scots officer, utterly lost to the riot around, was being buttonholed by a person of reverend aspect who explained to him, that, by the logic of his own ancestral creed, not only was the Highlander irrevocably damned, but that his damnation had been predetermined before Earth was made. “It’s unanswerable--just unanswerable,” said the young man sorrowfully. “I’ll be with ye.” He was moving off, when a smallish figure interposed, not without dignity. “Monsieur,” it said, “would it be of any comfort to you to know that _I_ am--I was--John Calvin?” At this the reverend one cursed and swore like the lost Soul he was, while the Highlander turned to discuss with Calvin, pacing towards The Gate, some alterations in the fabric of a work of fiction called the _Institutio_. Others were not so easily held. A certain Woman, with loosened hair, bare arms, flashing eyes and dancing feet, shepherded her knot of waverers, hoarse and exhausted. When the taunt broke out against her from the opposing line: “Tell ’em what you were! Tell ’em if you dare!” she answered unflinchingly, as did Judas who, worming through the crowd like an Armenian carpet-vendor, peddled his shame aloud that it might give strength to others. “Yes,” he would cry, “I am everything they say, but if _I_’m here it must be a moral cert for _you_, gents. This way, please. Many mansions, gentlemen! Go-ood billets! Don’t you notice these low people, Sar. _Plees_ keep hope, gentlemen!” When there were cases that cried to him from the ground--poor souls who could not stick it but had found their way out with a rifle and a boot-lace, he would tell them of his own end, till he made them contemptuous enough to rise up and curse him. Here St. Luke’s imperturbable bedside manner backed and strengthened the other’s almost too oriental flux of words. In this fashion and step by step, all the day’s Convoy were piloted past that danger-point where the Lower Establishment are, for reasons not given us, allowed to ply their trade. The pickets dropped to the rear, relaxed, and compared notes. “What always impresses me most,” said Death to St. Peter, “is the sheeplike simplicity of the intellectual mind.” He had been watching one of the pickets apparently overwhelmed by the arguments of an advanced atheist who--so hot in his argument that he was deaf to the offers of the Lower Establishment to make him a god--had stalked, talking hard--while the picket always gave ground before him--straight past the Broad Road. “He was plaiting of long-tagged epigrams,” the sober-faced picket smiled. “Give that sort only an ear and they’ll follow ye gobbling like turkeys.”