crucified, slipping from the fold of their pride into the pagan vast. Behind the boy's head boyish presences groped towards him.... The spell was snapped by a hurried pattering of feet downstairs. The scared face of Mrs. Massel appeared. "What dost thou mean?" she wailed, "what dost thou mean? Go! Touch him not! He might have died with fright! What art thou? What dost thou mean by it?" She had at last asserted herself. With weak hands she pushed him away from the door. "Come, leave the boy! He will go to bed at once! See, his face is like a tablecloth! Come, oi, oi, come!" "Go thou in front!" said Reb Monash. He entered the kitchen, where Philip cowered on his chair. He turned out the gas and without a word went upstairs to his room. A dull idiocy numbed Philip's brain. He put his head down between his hands, and it slipped before long on to the table. Here Mrs. Massel found him after some hours when she came down to light the fire. As he shook himself, a beetle fell sleepily from his sleeve. CHAPTER IX Some time previously, in the spring of the same year, the walls of Doomington had fallen to their last stone upon the blast of the trumpets of spring. Philip and Harry had adventured one afternoon beyond the moor called "Baxter's Hill" at the north of the town and found themselves by the side of a Mitchen distinctly cleaner than the river which flowed behind the wire factory at the bottom of Angel Street. They had walked up-stream for several miles out to a place of fresh fields and young lambs skipping. It was true that chimneys still punctuated every horizon with smoky fingers. But here and there were thickets of trees where the lads lay embowered in green peace, conscious of thick grass only and the speech of leaves. They both claimed the distinction of having first sighted the shimmering and enchanted carpet of blue below a sun-pierced canopy of foliage. Here they abandoned themselves to the first wild rapture of Spring--the first rapture of Spring Philip had known--burying their faces among the dewy bells. Further and further to the dusk they went, until a new town, flinging its van to meet them and to meet the Spring in their button-holes and hearts, said, "Advance no more!" Weary and sleepy and very hungry they came home that night, but their arms were lush with heaped bluebells and the knowledge of Spring was steady in them. They knew a place where Doomington was a lie and earth was soft. Into this place, in the attenuated figure of Alec Segal, the "clever devil" whose acquaintance Philip had made several months ago, came Atheism. The recent years of his history had not left Philip wholly unprepared for the assault against Judaism. But when Segal said casually that the Holy Bible's self was just a bundle of musty papyri, and God a dispensable formula, he was painfully shocked. "Look here, Segal!" he said, "How can you say such a thing? Anything might happen to a chap!"