In spite of which, the impulse to speak his little word would recur; and it came upon him stoutly one day on his way up town. As the elevated train slowly rounded a curve he looked into the open window of a room where a gloomy huddle of yellow-faced, sunken-cheeked, brown-bearded men bent their heads over busy sewing-machines. Nearest the window, full before it, was one that touched him--a young man with some hardy spirit of hope still enduring in his starved face, some stubborn refusal to recognise the odds against him. And fixed to his machine, where his eyes might now and then raise to it from his work, was a spray of lilac--his little spirit flaunting itself gaily even from the cross. The pathos of it was somehow intensified by the grinding of the wheels that carried him by it. The train creaked its way around the curve--but the face dreaming happily over the lilac spray in that hopeless room stayed in his mind, coercing him. As he entered the house, Nancy met him. "Do go and be host to those men. It's our day for the Ministers' Meeting," she continued, as he looked puzzled, "and just as they sat down Allan was called out to one of his people who is sick. Now run like a good boy and 'tend to them." So it came that, while the impulse was still strong upon him, he went in among the dozen amiable, feeding gentlemen who were not indisposed to listen to whomsoever might talk--if he did not bore--which is how it befell that they had presently cause to remark him. Not at first, for he mumbled hesitatingly, without authority of manner or point to his words, but the phrase, "the fundamental defect of the Christian religion" caused even the Unitarian to gasp over his glass of mineral water. His green eyes glittered pleasantly upon Bernal from his dark face with its scraggly beard. "That's it, Mr. Linford--tell us that--we need to know that--do we not, gentlemen?" "Speak for yourself, Whittaker," snapped the aggressive little Baptist, "but doubtless Mr. Linford has something to say." Bernal remained unperturbed by this. Very earnestly he continued: "Christianity is defective, judged even by poor human standards; untrue by the plain facts of human consciousness." "Ah! Now we shall learn!" Father Riley turned his most gracious smile upon the speaker.