"If you please, Sir Reginald," he began, coming as close to us before he spoke as if we had been deaf, after the manner of well-trained servants, "Mrs. Parkins out of the village has called to ask if you will kindly go and see her father-in-law, him being in terrible pain this morning with his sciatica, and asking for you all the time." Jeavons never used such words as "pray" or "heal" when he brought me messages from the village people begging for my ministrations. He reserved such expressions for what he considered their proper place--namely, the church and the doctor's surgery respectively. Though they knew their own places--and kept to them--Jeavons and Annabel had much in common: the same absolute devotion to the conventional and the commonplace--the same horror of the emotional and the unusual. I rose from my seat. "Tell Mrs. Parkins that I will come at once," I said. "Fay, will you come with me?" "Of course I will," she replied, and we crossed the lawn and went through the heavy garden-door, hatless as we were, into the village, and past the old inn to Parkins's cottage. I often took my wife with me when I went to visit the sick, because I believed that "two or three gathered together" literally meant two or three gathered together, and that therefore, when Fay's supplications were added to mine, my prayer was all the more efficacious. I have found life so much simpler and easier since I learned to take the Bible literally, and not to be always reading between the lines to find out spiritual meanings which might or might not be there. I remember an enlightened and eminent modern Dean once explaining to me that when Christ said, "The blind see, the deaf hear, the lame walk and the lepers are cleansed," He meant that those hitherto blind to spiritual visions were enlightened, those hitherto deaf to sacred truths were made to hear them, those who had aforetime stumbled were able to walk in the paths of righteousness, and those steeped in sin were washed clean. "Mr. Dean," I replied, "you, as a dignitary of the Church, probably know better than I what Christ _meant_; a mere layman such as myself can only deal with what He _said_: and He didn't say anything at all like that." I hate "reading between the lines," even in ordinary human correspondence. At least a third of the troubles of this life have their origin in their pernicious habit; for people read a great deal of unintentional enmity--and, still worse, a great deal of imaginary love--into pages actually virgin of either of these extremes. And when they read between the lines of Holy Scripture, they read in all their own prejudices and fads and fancies, until Divine Truth is distorted and perverted. I can stand many things, but I cannot stand a Bowdlerised Bible. Fay and I entered the cottage, whither Mrs. Parkins had preceded us.