The laughter vanished from Elisabeth's face, as if it had been wiped out with a sponge. "Oh! I—I don't know," she murmured lamely.
"Then you must find out. To me it seems that you are the one woman in all the world who was made for me. Your personality attracted me the first moment that I met you; and our subsequent companionship has proved that our minds habitually run in the same grooves, and that we naturally look at things from the same standpoint. That is so, is it not?"
"Yes."
"The only serious difference between us seemed to be the difference of faith. You had been trained in the doctrines of one of the strictest sects, while I had outgrown all dogmas and thrown aside all recognised forms of religion. So strong were my feelings on this point, that I would not have married any woman who still clung to the worn-out and (by me) disused traditions; but I fancy that I have succeeded in converting you to my views, and that our ideas upon religion are now practically identical. Is not that so?"
Elisabeth thought for a moment. "Yes," she answered slowly; "you have taught me that Christianity, like all the other old religions, has had its day; and that the world is now ready for a new dispensation."
"Exactly; and for a dispensation which shall unite the pure ethics of the Christian to the joyous vitality of the Greek, eliminating alike the melancholy of the one and the sensualism of the other. You agree with me in this, do you not?"
"You know that I do."
"I am glad, because—as I said before—I could not bear to marry any woman who did not see eye to eye with me on these vital matters. I love you very dearly, Elisabeth, and it would be a great grief to me if any question of opinion or conviction came between us; yet I do not believe that two people could possibly be happy together—however much they might love each other—if they were not one with each other on subjects such as these."
Elisabeth was silent; she was too much excited to speak. Her heart was thumping like the great hammer at the Osierfield, and she was trembling all over. So she held her peace as they drove up the principal street of Silverhampton and across the King's Square to the lych-gate of St. Peter's Church; but Alan, looking into the tell-tale face he knew so well, was quite content.
Yet as she sat beside Alan in St. Peter's Church that summer evening, and thought upon what she had just done, a great sadness filled Elisabeth's soul. The sun shone brightly through the western window, and wrote mystic messages upon the gray stone walls; but the lights of the east window shone pale and cold in the distant apse, where the Figure of the Crucified gleamed white upon a foundation of emerald. And as she looked at the Figure, which the world has wept over and worshipped for nineteen centuries, she realized that this was the Symbol of all that she was giving up and leaving behind her—the Sign of that religion of love and sorrow which men call Christianity. She felt that wisdom must be justified of her children, and not least of her, Elisabeth Farringdon; nevertheless, she mourned for the myth which had once made life seem fair, and death even fairer. Although she had outgrown her belief in it, its beauty had still power to touch her heart, if not to convince her intellect; and she sighed as she recalled all that it had once meant, and how it had appeared to be the one satisfactory solution to the problems which weary and perplex mankind. Now she must face all the problems over again in the grim twilight of dawning science, with no longer a Star of Bethlehem to show where the answer might be found; and her spirit quailed at the pitiless prospect. She had never understood before how much that Symbol of eternal love and vicarious suffering had been to her, nor how puzzling would be the path through the wilderness if there were no Crucifix at life's cross-roads to show the traveller which way to go; and her heart grew heavier as she took part in the sacred office of Evensong, and thought how beautiful it all would be if only it were true. She longed to be a little child again—a child to whom the things which are not seen are as the things which are seen, and the things which are not as the things which are; and she could have cried with homesickness when she remembered how firmly she had once believed that the shadow which hung over the Osierfield was a pillar of cloud by day and a pillar of fire by night, to testify that God was still watching over His people, as in the days of old. Now she knew that the pillar was only the smoke and the flame of human industries; and the knowledge brought a load of sadness, as it seemed to typify that there was no longer any help for the world but in itself.