"A religious liberty or license as you like, but at any rate something that would have seemed to them appallingly wicked,--a thousand times worse than anything they fled from into the desert." Mrs. Herman was silent a moment while he waited for her answer. Her eyes grew darker, and the color flushed in her cheeks. "It is odd enough for me to be the champion of Puritanism," she said at length, "and yet it seems to me that after all they did their work well, and that it was permanent. They left on the land the stress of sincerity and earnestness. Creeds fall away just as leaves drop from the trees, but each leaf has helped. Religions decay, but the salvation of the race must depend upon human steadfastness to conviction." "Then I suppose that you think Phil is nearer to the heart of things than I am." "Not in the least. The difference between you is superficial rather than real so long as you are both true to your convictions." "But it seems to me," Maurice objected, "that Phil is looking at truth as a sort of fetish. He seems to feel that the root of the matter is in a dogma, and a dogma is only the fossil remains of a truth that is gone by." She laughed appreciatively. "Have you caught the fever for making epigrams? I'm afraid there's a good deal of truth in what you say about Cousin Philip. He can't help looking at religion as an end rather than a means." "Has it ever struck you that he might finish by going over to the Catholics?" "No," she answered, "I confess I'd never thought of it; but I see what you mean." "It will seem to him a moral catastrophe, a sort of ecclesiastical cataclysm," Maurice continued, "if Father Frontford isn't elected; and as far as I can judge there isn't much chance of that." "No," she assented, "I don't think there is much chance." "He said to me one day," added Maurice thoughtfully, "that in the Catholic Church there never could have been any danger of the election of a heretic bishop. I am afraid this will decide him." Mrs. Herman regarded him with a smile, studying him as if she were reading the working of his mind. "You think that a misfortune," she commented. "You feel that it is a step farther into the darkness." "It is to narrow rather than to broaden his horizon, is it not?" She played with her fan a moment, smiling to herself in a way which he did not understand, and looking down as if considering some old memory. Then she met his glance with a look at once kind and wistful.