She started. "Of course! I remember now! But—I've never heard it played like that before."
A very strange smile crossed his face. "No one but you would have understood," he said. "I wanted you to hear it—like that."
She withdrew her hands from his. Something in his words sent a curious feeling that was almost dread through her heart.
"I don't—quite—know what you mean," she said.
"Don't you?" said Piers, and in his voice there rang a note of recklessness. "It's a difficult thing to put into words, isn't it? I just wanted you to see the Open Heaven as I have seen it—and as I shall never see it again."
"Piers!" she said.
He answered her almost fiercely. "No, you won't understand. Of course you can't understand. You will never stand hammering at the bars, breaking your heart in the dark. Wasn't that the sort of picture our kindly parson drew for us on Sunday? It's a pretty theme—the tortures of the damned!"
"My dear Piers!" Avery spoke quickly and vehemently. "Surely you have too much sense to take such a discourse as that seriously! I longed to tell the children not to listen. It is wicked—wicked—to try to spread spiritual terror in people's hearts, and to call it the teaching of religion. It is no more like religion than a penny-terrible is like life. It is a cruel and fantastic distortion of the truth."
She paused. Piers was listening to her with that odd hunger in his eyes that had looked out of them the night before.
"You don't believe in hell then?" he said quietly, after a moment.