"I know all that you mean," he said. "I don't agree with you in the least, but I appreciate your point of view. But let me keep myself out of the discussion for a moment. I am not what you would probably be prepared to call a professing Christian. But how about Moultrie? He sent me Lothian's poems first of all. I remember the actual evening last winter when they arrived. A contemporaneous circumstance has etched it into my memory with certainty. Moultrie is a deeply convinced Christian. He is a man of the widest culture also. Yet he savours his palate with every _nuance_, every elusive and delicate melody that the genius of Lothian gives us. How about Moultrie's attitude?--it is a very general one." Mr. Medley laughed, half with apology, half with the grim humour which was personal to him. "I quite admit all you say," he replied, "but, as I told you, I belong to another generation and I don't in the least mean to change or listen to the voice of the charmer! I am a prejudiced old fogey, in short! I am still so antiquated and foolish as to have a temperamental dislike for a French-man, for instance. I like a picture to tell a story, and I flatly refused to get into Moultrie's abominable automobile when he brought it to the Rectory the other day!" Morton Sims was not in the least deceived by this half real, half mocking apologia. It was not merely a question of style that had roused this heat in the dry elderly man when he spoke of the things which he so greatly disliked in the poet's work. There was something behind this, and the doctor meant to find out what it was. He was in Mortland Royal, in the first instance, in order to follow up the problem of Gilbert Lothian. His choice of a country residence had been determined by the Poet's locality. Every instinct of the scientist and hunter was awake in him. He had dreadful reasons, reasons which he could never quite think of without a mental shudder, for finding out everything about the unknown and elusive genius who had given "Surgit Amari," to the world. He looked his companion full in the face, and spoke in a compelling, searching voice that the other had not heard before. "What's the real antagonism, Mr. Medley?" he said. Then the clergyman spoke out. "You press me," he said, "very well, I will tell you. I don't believe Lothian is a good man. It is a stern and terrible thing to say,--God grant I am mistaken!--but he appears to me to write of supreme things with insincerity. Not vulgarly, you'll understand. Not with his tongue in his cheek, but without the conviction that imposes conduct, and perhaps even with his heart in his mouth!" "Conduct?" ". . . I fear I am saying too much." "Hardly to me! Then Mr. Lothian--?" "He drinks," the Priest said bluntly, "you're sure to hear of it in some indirect way since you are going to stay in the village for six months. But that's the truth of it!"