"Now that is the way I like to hear people talk," she exclaimed with a merry laugh; "I am quite sure that the only way to be truthful is to be cynical." "I am afraid so." "If I were a young and inexperienced girl, the person on whose judgment I should most depend would be the one who most sincerely disbelieved in the existence of virtue." "No, no. Such an infidel would make a bad guide." "An infallible guide, you mean. How could he err?" "He would err by not being able to grasp the full character of the world's wickedness. He would underrate its depravity by allowing it no virtue whatever." "I don't understand. This is a paradox," said she stopping, for we had reached the gate. "Would you increase the world's wickedness by making it virtuous?" "Yes, up to a certain point. I speak in the sense of Dean Swift, who said we had all of us Christianity enough to make us hate one another. Virtue has a very fructifying power, and vice springs richly from its soil. A totally wicked world is an impossibility. That dreadful place to which we are told sinners will be consigned cannot be utterly wicked, or it could not exist." "I almost catch your meaning, but you don't express yourself well, Mr. Thorburn." "You are quite right. I am given, I am sorry to say, to walking round my thoughts too much." I could have added that such eyes as hers were not calculated to make a man logical or even disputatious, save in a love argument. "I am then to believe that there is enough good in the world to make it more wicked than it would be were there no good?" "Why, having advanced my position, I am bound to stick to it. You have said indeed what I think, but what I would not preach." She stood lost in thought for some moments. "Mr. Thorburn," she presently said, "I think the world very, very bad; it is cold-hearted, selfish, and dishonourable and mean and pitiless. I see now that it could not be all this if it had not what it calls virtue and religion to prompt it; for the virtue of the world teaches us to hate those whom it pronounces corrupt; and its religion"----she stopped with a bewildered look; "what does its religion teach?" "History will answer that better than I. But what have we to do with the world, Mrs. Fraser? Here, under that tender sky, amid these flowers, fanned by this soft air, we should not let thoughts of its wrongs and treacheries trouble us." "If one could throw memory upon the air and bid the breeze bear its burden a thousand miles away, then would it be well. But the afternoon is passing. Good-bye, Mr. Thorburn." "When may I see you again?" "Oh, you will find a time," she answered with a little demure laugh; and so saying she passed through the gate. CHAPTER V.