“Would you mind helping me mark this place where we are?”
“Why?”
“Look here, you won’t think I’m pretending? but I believe I was converted at that moment.”
Chator’s well-known look of alarm that always followed one of Michael’s doctrinal or liturgical announcements was more profound than it had ever been before.
“Converted?” he gasped. “What to?”
“Oh, not to anything,” said Michael. “Only different from what I was just now, and I want to mark the place.”
“Do you mean—put up a cross or something?”
“No, not a cross. Because, when I was converted, I felt a sudden feeling of being frightfully alive. I’d rather put a stone and plant harebells round it. We can dig with our spanners. I like stones. They’re so frightfully old, and I’d like to think, if I was ever a long way from here, of my stone and the harebells looking at it—every year new harebells and the same old stone.”
“Do you know what I think you are?” enquired Chator solemnly. “I think you’re a mystic.”
“I never can understand what a mystic was,” said Michael.