“A little grain of mustard-seed,” he heard her saying more tremulously. “And if a sycamine-tree could move—! Surely you don’t hold with the unbelievers!” It was precisely whom Bundock did hold with, but the big black eyes seemed suddenly tearful and appealing, her needle seemed entering his breast, and she swam before him as a fine, voluptuous female. Through the passage he saw the apple-trees in bridal bloom and the white feminine washing, and the Master’s remark on the apparent miracle of the extraction of electric flashes from the human body thrilled in his memory. “Of course not,” he heard himself saying soothingly, while his legs felt going forward, losing all the ground so laboriously won. “Then you do believe the angel moved?” she asked eagerly. “Don’t I see her moving?” he replied. Miss Gentry looked down from her doorstep more in sorrow than in anger. “You’re a married man!” she reminded him again. “And does marriage pick out a man’s eyes—like a goat-sucker?” He felt too near her now to back out, and he put forth his hand for hers, not without nervousness at the needle. Could his father have seen him now, he might have thought his son not even “moral.” But Miss Gentry dexterously met the amorous palm with a tract. “That’ll open your eyes,” she said. To feel a flabby piece of paper instead of a warm hand is not conducive to theological persuasion: all Bundock’s dissenting blood rushed to his head. “There’s two opinions about that,” he snorted. “There _are_ two opinions,” Miss Gentry assented placidly; “one wrong and the other mine.” “Oh, of course!” he sneered. “The Church is always infallible.” “We’re eighteen and a half centuries old,” said Miss Gentry freezingly. “Did you put that in your census paper?” retorted the humorist. Miss Gentry winced. She was weary of the jokes that had desolated Bradmarsh, yet she was conscious of having let her landlady’s estimate of her age go by default. “I had no paper to fill up,” she reminded him frigidly. “But if there was a census of religions, you’d certainly be among the mushrooms.” “Better than being among the mummies.” Bundock’s father might have clapped his palsied hands, to hear this defender of the faith. But Miss Gentry mistook this fair retort in kind for another allusion to the personal census. “I thought you could discuss like a gentleman!” It was a cunning shaft, and Squibs, seizing this moment to rub herself against the postman’s leggings, he replied more mildly: “What’s the use of going by age—except the Age of Reason?” “Then be guided by Reason.” Miss Gentry stitched implacably. “If the Almighty meant prayer to be medicine, why did He create castor-oil?” Bundock was dumbfounded. “Or Epsom salts?” she added triumphantly. “They’re for cattle which can’t pray,” he answered with an inspiration. Miss Gentry’s needle stabbed the air. But she recovered herself. “Then why do you eat rhubarb pie?” “Because it’s nice.” He grinned. “But rhubarb’s a medicine!”