"The ground must be cleared," returned Anthony. "You are sitting upon the rubbish, as a miser in Pompeii might have sat upon his gold while Vesuvius overflowed. It is wiser to flee and leave hoarded treasure to be ingulfed. That the rubbish was once sound theology, I grant, but it has crumbled, and its usefulness of a thousand years ago will not it save from the ash-heap of outgrown ideas to-day." Father Speares sighed and set his lips. "The boy is young," he said, with the yearning self-deception of age. "It will pass, and he will return the stronger for his wandering." But the event had not borne out his prophecy. It did not pass, and Anthony did not return. "It is my head," he explained, half irritably. "There is a wall of scepticism surrounding my brain, through which only the toughest facts may penetrate. I am minus the faculty of credulity." "Or reverence," Father Speares added, reproachfully. "You regard spiritual things as a deaf man regards sound or a blind man sight." Anthony's irritation triumphed. "Or as a man awake regards a dream," he suggested. "The film of superstition has cleared from my eyes, and I see. The truth is that I regard all religions exactly as you regard all except the one which you inherited. An accident of birth has made you a Christian instead of a Moslem or a Brahman, that is all." "And a twist of the mind has made you an atheist." "As you please--atheist, agnostic, sceptic, what you will. It only means that you offer me an irrational assumption, and I reject it. It is the custom of you theologians to fit ugly epithets to your opponents, whereas the denial of Christianity no more argues atheism than the denial of Confucianism does. It merely proves that a man refuses to acknowledge any one of the gods which men have created, and that he leaves the ultimate essence outside his generalizations. Such a man has learned the first lesson in knowledge--the lesson of his own ignorance." "And has missed the greater lesson of the wisdom of God." Algarcife shrugged his shoulders. "It is no use," he said; "I can't believe, and I wouldn't if I could." So he had gone from Father Speares into the world. Virile, strenuous, and possessed with intellectual passion, he had closed the doors of his mind upon commonplaces, and with the improvidence from which mental stamina failed to redeem him had wedded himself to poverty and science. Five years after leaving Father Speares's roof he returned with Mariana at his side. "We have come to be married," he announced. Father Speares gasped and suggested prudence. "It is unwise," he remonstrated--"it is utterly unwise." "I agree with you," admitted Anthony. "It is unwise, and we know it; but there is nothing else to be done--is there, Mariana?" Mariana looked into Father Speares's face and smiled. "Of course you are right," she said, "and we are very foolish, but--but there really isn't anything else to do."