Osmond shook his head dumbly. "Shall we say the great scheme counteracts its own abuses, and we won't interfere? When an empire gets sufficiently corrupt, it tumbles apart of its own rottenness? Or when we see just cause, shall we go to war?" "Grannie has the whole secret of it in her hand." This he said involuntarily, for he had no idea of talking to MacLeod about grannie. But the subject had passed beyond their predilections of what was best to say. "Science won't do it--war won't do it. Religion will." "Ah! You are an enthusiast." "No. But there is something beyond force and beyond reason." "Religion, you mean." "You can call it that. It is what has made that old woman up there at the house live every day of her life as if she were the multi-millionaire of the universe--without a thought of herself, without a doubt that there is an inexhaustible reservoir, and that everybody can dip into it and bring up the water of life. Sometimes when she told me that--how rich we all are, if we only knew it--I used to see the multitudes of hands dipping in for their drop--old wrinkled hands, children's hands." He was musing now, and yet admitting the other man to his confidence. It was proof of MacLeod's charm that even Osmond, who kept his true self to himself, and who started by hating a girl's oppressor, had nevertheless fallen into a maze of self-betrayal. MacLeod spoke softly, as if he recognized the spell and would not break it:-- "Yet, the Founder of her religion said, 'I came not to send peace, but a sword.'" "How do you know who the Founder of her religion is? I don't know it myself. I don't know but she dug it out of the ground, or breathed it out of the air. She has her sword, too, grannie has. You never saw her licking a boy for torturing a rat. I have." "What shall we do?" Osmond roused himself a little from his muse. "I read something the other day in a book--about the town of Abdera. I suppose you know it." MacLeod shook his head. "In the town of Abdera they suddenly began to love one another, that's all. They went round chanting, 'O Cupid, prince of God and men!'" "Is that going to obviate all the difficulties?" Osmond looked at him with dog's eyes, the eyes that seek and wonder out of their confusion of incomplete knowledge. "Every man would refuse to rest," he said, "while any other man was hungry. They would all be humble, the rich as well as the poor. Now, one's as cocky as the other. I don't know that the cockiness of the ignorant is any more picturesque than the cockiness of the privileged." MacLeod was smiling a little. These, he saw, were pretty dreams, but hardly of the texture to demand destruction. They would fall to pieces, in good time, of their own flimsiness. "Do you believe in kings?" he asked idly. Osmond glowed.