Not that he was destitute of all sense of religion; in his own way he valued it, though not upon the grounds that were common with ordinary pious folk. He thought it a good thing that men should have definite views of truth, especially when their views encouraged them in the belief that they would become in another world persons of as much importance as they had been in this. As he understood the matter, it was necessary for a man to have certain right beliefs in order that he might become secure of the reversion of eternal happiness; and if that were true, a man would be a fool who did not accept these beliefs. Hence he was severely orthodox, and insisted on orthodoxy in his family. He liked a good sermon, he liked good music, and it was part of his pride that the Highbourne Gardens Church had both in all excellence unapproachable by any of the lesser churches in the neighbourhood. This was the limit of his apprehension as regards the church. He recognised in it one of the great proprieties of life, a kind of etiquette toward God which no moral human creature would refuse. That he was moral, in the ordinary meaning of the word, there could be no doubt. Long ago, when he was a mere day-labourer, he had indulged in a week's drunkenness, and had learned once for all the lesson that success in life is not compatible with insobriety. He had been discharged from his employment, and had spent a miserable month in hunting work with a damaged character. From that hour he was a water-drinker. Life, having taught him this lesson, proceeded to teach him a second, that the man who means to succeed must not meddle with the coarser passions. He had come near to an entanglement with an evil woman, and had issued from it with a fixed conviction that the pleasures of passion were never worth the price men paid for them. Here the original hardness of his nature served him, and this was soon reinforced by the temper of ambition. Cool, shrewd, alert, he became too much enamoured of success to stop for wayside pleasures; he knew the more recondite joy of climbing over the shoulders of disabled men to seize the prize which they had forfeited. In a word, it paid him to be moral, and his temperament jumped with his self-interest. But of morality in its higher forms of ethical ideals he knew nothing. Deacon of a church as he was, he was still a pirate, a buccaneer, a highwayman of commerce, thirsting for illicit adventure. There was a grim humour in the situation of which he himself caught brief glimpses. Like the bandit who makes a gift to the Virgin from his spoils, and holds himself henceforth reconciled to heaven, so Masterman paid his tithe to God, in the comfortable faith that no one had the right to examine too closely the means by which it was obtained.