“Well, I can’t exactly remember what you said.” “Then what’s the use of saying I’m a Protestant?” cried Michael in triumph. “I think I’ll play footer again next term,” he added inconsequently. “I jolly well would,” Chator agreed. “You ought to have played last football term.” “Except that I like thinking,” said Michael. “Which is rotten in the middle of a game. It’s jolly decent going to the monastery, isn’t it? I could keep walking on this road for ever without getting tired.” “We can ride again now,” said Chator. “Well, don’t scorch, because we’ll miss all the decent flowers if you do,” said Michael. Then silently for awhile they breasted the slighter incline of the summit. “Only six weeks of these ripping holidays,” Michael sighed. “And then damned old school again.” “Hark!” shouted Chator suddenly. “I hear the Angelus.” Both boys dismounted and listened. Somewhere, indeed, a bell was chiming, but a bell of such quality that the sound of it through the summer was like a cuckoo’s song in its unrelation to place. Michael and Chator murmured their salute of the Incarnation, and perhaps for the first time Michael half realized the mysterious condescension of God. Here, high up on these downs, the Word became imaginable, a silence of wind and sunlight. “I say, Chator,” Michael began. “What?” “Would you mind helping me mark this place where we are?” “Why?” “Look here, you won’t think I’m pretending? but I believe I was converted at that moment.” Chator’s well-known look of alarm that always followed one of Michael’s doctrinal or liturgical announcements was more profound than it had ever been before. “Converted?” he gasped. “What to?” “Oh, not _to_ anything,” said Michael. “Only different from what I was just now, and I want to mark the place.” “Do you mean—put up a cross or something?” “No, not a cross. Because, when I was converted, I felt a sudden feeling of being frightfully alive. I’d rather put a stone and plant harebells round it. We can dig with our spanners. I like stones. They’re so frightfully old, and I’d like to think, if I was ever a long way from here, of my stone and the harebells looking at it—every year new harebells and the same old stone.” “Do you know what I think you are?” enquired Chator solemnly. “I think you’re a mystic.” “I never can understand what a mystic was,” said Michael. “Nobody can,” said Chator encouragingly. “But lots of them were made saints all the same. I don’t think you ever will be, because you do put forward the most awfully dangerous doctrines. I do think you ought to be careful about that. I do really.”