'What can have happened to Osborne? He amazes me. How can he have lost his faith? Find a love and lose a faith! Monstrous! Find a love and find a faith was the rule. Love first wakened young men to religion. They loved; they could not believe the object of their idolatry was mere clay, destined to melt back into earth, like an apple or snow. He cannot endure the idea that when his eyes close, or when hers, they are to see each other no more. That is what roused me up first. It was the dread that I should lose her for ever when I die that made me think of what I was taught when I was young, and see its beauty and its truth. But Osborne, Osborne, Osborne, how is it with him?' Osborne's thoughts were much less clearly defined. He wondered what brought Nevill there, but the wonder was ill-defined and weak. He was in no particular anxiety to find out why Nevill went to St Paul's. He had a general dim idea that the circumstances fitted in with something in his own case; he was too indolent, too tired, too worn, too weak, too miserable, to try and see where the coincidence lay. But his feelings made up in intensity for the vagueness of his thoughts. Heaven and heaven on earth were vanishing from him at the one time, through the one agency. The same sly awful hand that stole his faith away would steal his darling away also. Oh, misery and desolation! As a last resource he had come to that great temple. When his mind seemed tottering, and the ground was tottering beneath his feet, when the pillars of the heavens were shaken over his head, when the clangour of words falling headlong into ruin had horrified his ears, he had fled to that holy fane, that noble pile, raised by pious hands, frequented by pious souls. He had tried with all his might to force back what had escaped him. He' had failed. The carnival of the beast continued, and, hideous thought, loathsome degradation, intolerable fate, he was compelled not only to look on, but to take part in that revolting saturnalia of reason. Lose her? Of course he should lose her. What could prevent him losing her? Nothing. Oh dreary, bald world, what wert thou made for? What was he made for? Oh mockery, to call into existence such worship of the Divine, such loyal, unselfish love of her as his had been, to snatch both away from him at one swoop, in one fell hour! He could not bear the idea. In order to shut it out he spoke. 'I have had a very long walk. I have eaten nothing all day. You must think me mad, Nevill. I am not quite out of my senses, but I am far from sane,' he said. 'We are just like two newly-convicted felons chained together for the first time. Each of us knows the other has a story that would interest him, and that he will hear; each is so absorbed in his own history he cannot free his mind enough to take any interest in the circumstances of the other,' said Nevill, by way of reply.