"I say, Wynne," he remarked, looking up into the face of the other with a twinkling eye, "the Dominie gave us a good preachment to-day in support of his authority. It almost made me resolve to rebel the next time I was told to do anything." "Then I suppose that you don't agree with him," Maurice responded rather absently. "Oh, it isn't that. I do agree with him. I mean to be a bishop myself some day, and then the doctrine will come in all right. I'll work it. Down South we understand that sort of thing better than you do up here." "Then what did you object to in the lecture?" "I didn't object to anything; only when anybody proves that you ought not to do a thing isn't it human nature to want to do it, just for the fun of it?" Maurice felt how far from serious was the temper of the boy, and that it would be utterly unreasonable to expect from him anything like reverence. "Then how do you expect anybody to hold to the doctrine of implicit obedience?" he questioned, smiling. "Oh, everybody expects to wield the authority sometime," was the light answer. "Nobody'd hold to it otherwise." Maurice instinctively glanced at Ashe. In Philip's pale, enrapt face was an expression of self-surrender which made Wynne feel how completely the teaching to which they had just listened must appeal to the temperament of his friend. "To obey for the sake of obeying is precisely what Phil would delight in," he thought. "How entirely different we are! Yet if it hadn't been for him I should never have come here. Haven't I strength enough to follow my own convictions?" The hour for walking was four, and a few minutes after the clocks had struck, Maurice and Philip started out. It was a dull and lowering afternoon, and the narrow, street was already gloomy with shadows. Half unconsciously Wynne found himself casting about in his mind for topics of conversation which should be free from the personal element. Now that the time for confidences had come, he shrank from words. He reproached himself, and then half peevishly thought: "I seem nowadays to do nothing but to find fault with myself for things that I can't help feeling!" "I am glad Father Frontford said what he did today," Ashe remarked after they had walked in silence for a little. "It was just what I needed. I've got so in the habit of following my own will since we have been out in the world that I needed to be reminded that there is something better." Maurice felt a faint irritation that the talk was begun in precisely the key he would most gladly have avoided, but honesty would not let him be silent. "I am afraid, Phil," he said, "that I'm not entirely in sympathy with you. I didn't like the lecture. Since we are given will and reason, I believe that it was intended that we should use them." "Of course. If I had no reason, how could I bring myself to give up my own will to one that I know to be higher?" Maurice smiled unhappily.