“Well, how did you do it, then?” he asked. “I congratulate you, anyhow. It was very neat.”
“I didn’t do it. I had no idea, at least, whether you were asleep or awake at midnight. I only knew that Divine Love was looking after you.”
Something rather like a sneer came into Thurso’s voice.
“Did—ah! did Divine Love tell you so?” he asked.
“Yes, most emphatically. He has promised to look after us all, you know, and do everything that is good for us. My word! you’ve never seen such a beauty of a morning outside. Cold, though.”
Thurso was undeniably in a very bad humour by this time. He felt convinced in his own mind that there had been some hypnotic force or suggestive influence used on him last night; but when a man denies it, and simply attributes all that has happened to the working of Divine Love, you cannot contradict him. Maud, however, had read to him last night out of some Christian Science book, and he had found, he thought, a hundred inconsistencies in it. Cochrane’s last words, too, were utterly inconsistent, simple as they sounded.
“How can you say it is cold,” he asked, “when your whole Gospel is rooted, so I understand, in the unreality of all such things—cold, heat, pain, and so on? Or did I misunderstand, do you think, what Maud read to me last night? I certainly gathered that neither cold nor heat had any real existence.”
“No; but we think it has,” said Cochrane, with his mouth full.
“Then, is it not what the Reverend Mrs. Eddy calls ‘voicing error’ to allude to the temperature of the morning?”
Cochrane laughed, a great big genial laugh.