"One minute!" said Challis. "Tell me; what sort of questions? That is most important." "I do not remember precisely," returned Crashaw, "but one, I think, was as to the sources of the Bible. I did not read anything beyond simple and somewhat unusual curiosity into those questions, I may say.... I talked to him for some considerable time--I dare say for more than an hour...." "No signs of idiocy, apparently, during all this?" "I consider it less a case of idiocy than one of possession, maleficent possession," replied Crashaw. He did not see his host's grim smile. "Well, and the blasphemy?" prompted Challis. "At the end of my instruction, the child, still looking away from me, shook his head and said that what I had told him was not true, I confess that I was staggered. Possibly I lost my temper, somewhat. I may have grown rather warm in my speech. And at last...." Crashaw clenched his hands and spoke in such a low voice that Challis could hardly hear him. "At last he turned to me and said things which I could not possibly repeat, which I pray that I may never hear again from the mouth of any living being." "Profanities, obscenities, er--swear-words," suggested Challis. "Blasphemy, blasphemy," cried Crashaw. "Oh! I wonder that I did not injure the child." Challis moved over to the window again. For more than a minute there was silence in that big, neglected-looking room. Then Crashaw's feelings began to find vent in words, in a long stream of insistent asseverations, pitched on a rising note that swelled into a diapason of indignation. He spoke of the position and power of his Church, of its influence for good among the uneducated, agricultural population among which he worked. He enlarged on the profound necessity for a living religion among the poorer classes; and on the revolutionary tendency towards socialism, which would be encouraged if the great restraining power of a creed that enforced subservience to temporal power was once shaken. And, at last, he brought his arguments to a head by saying that the example of a child of four years old, openly defying a minister of the Church, and repudiating the very conception of the Deity, was an example which might produce a profound effect upon the minds of a slow-thinking people; that such an example might be the leaven which would leaven the whole lump; and that for the welfare of the whole neighbourhood it was an instant necessity that the child should be put under restraint, his tongue bridled, and any opportunity to proclaim his blasphemous doctrines forcibly denied to him. Long before he had concluded, Crashaw was on his feet, pacing the room, declaiming, waving his arms. Challis stood, unanswering, by the window. He did not seem to hear; he did not even shrug his shoulders. Not till Crashaw had brought his argument to a culmination, and boomed into a dramatic silence, did Challis turn and look at him.