Everard glanced at the pretty curtains before the windows.
“No, my boy, you do not smoke here. And, in fact, I like your claret; I won’t spoil the flavour of it.”
“As you please; but I think Fanny will be distressed.”
“You shall say that I have abandoned the weed.”
Emotions were at conflict in Micklethwaite’s mind, but finally he beamed with gratitude.
“Barfoot”—he bent forward and touched his friend’s arm—“there are angels walking the earth in this our day. Science hasn’t abolished them, my dear fellow, and I don’t think it ever will.”
“It falls to the lot of but few men to encounter them, and of fewer still to entertain them permanently in a cottage at South Tottenham.”
“You are right.” Micklethwaite laughed in a new way, with scarcely any sound; a change Everard had already noticed. “These two sisters—but I had better not speak about them. In my old age I have become a worshipper, a mystic, a man of dream and vision.”
“How about worship in a parochial sense?” inquired Barfoot, smiling. “Any difficulty of that point?”
“I conform, in moderation. Nothing would be asked of me. There is no fanaticism, no intolerance. It would be brutal if I declined to go to church on a Sunday morning. You see, my strictly scientific attitude helps in avoiding offence. Fanny can’t understand it, but my lack of dogmatism vastly relieves her. I have been trying to explain to her that the scientific mind can have nothing to do with materialism. The new order of ideas is of course very difficult for her to grasp; but in time, in time.”