Mr. Trimblerigg stopped to breathe; and while he did so I made a psychological examination of that poor work of art which was yet, in its way, so perfect a masterpiece. Had Mr. Trimblerigg been more of an expert in old wash-drawings and brushwork, had he been gifted with a more sceptical turn of mind than that which had fitted his views to such differing situations, he might have examined those initials, and that spot of mildew defacing the supposititious features, more minutely, analytically and chemically than he actually did. That the wash-drawing as a whole was well over a hundred years old any expert would probably have agreed; whether he would have given the same date to the initials, and a few other salient touches I had my doubt, and the doubt remains unresolved; no expert has ever been called in to decide the matter. If Miss Sparling herself limed that snare, she certainly did it well; the obliteration of the face, with just the suggestion of a likeness left, was finely controlled; and yet the control may have only been Father Time’s; and whether it was luck, or whether Susannah Walcot was in truth a prophetess of penetrating power, who is now to say? The lengths to which the human faculties can go have often filled me with astonishment; Mr. Trimblerigg was only one instance among many. On this occasion, however, he did not astonish me in the least; he did what I expected him to do. Before that culminating piece of evidence--that silent but resounding call--he sank upon his knees, and remained on them for a long time. I watched the motions of his mind; they were very interesting; but they had not really to go far. That he was called to be a shining light to the whole civilized world did not at this stage of things surprise him. As a probability he had thought so ever since he could remember; recently he had been made sure of it. It was only the strange manner of this final call, and its clearly miraculous accompaniments that did a little stagger him. It also caused a definite shift--a shift to the right--in his always adjustable theology. It drew him definitely from modernism back toward True Belief. For this was something with which modernism could not be reconciled; it was primitive, apocalyptic, ultra-evangelical, it made, amongst other things, for the literal interpretation of Scripture: if this was true, the other was not. And so it became clear that in accepting the call from such a source, his own cast of faith must be simplified once and for all,--that he must revert to the earlier faith of his Uncle Phineas.