"Oh, but surely, if you tried you could find something! It seems to me you ought to try."
"Oh, I have tried!" he said, his cheeks flushing with painful emotion; "but now they don't want me to come back any more—they never want to see me again! I used to pray I might never change;—and when you would argue with me,—but now I see it was all wrong, and all my liberal ideas—"
"I hope," Foley interrupted, for this had been on his conscience ever since his talk with Abel, "I hope your change, whatever it is, has nothing to do with anything I ever said; you must have misunderstood me," and he went on to explain that he had never been really reactionary. He had always believed in compromise, and a conservative, reasonable progress.
"Do you know, Eliaphet," he went on, "I think you have made a mistake in staying here so long in this old place. It isn't wholesome to live so far from real life; you ought to get away, you ought to go home."
But Sutton had only listened to two or three of his friend's words. "No," he cried eagerly, "no, we can make no compromise. We must give up the human reason, we must go back to the Past, we must submit. Oh, Foley," he cried, and there was a strange appeal in his voice, "we have been friends, but now we may never see each other again,—let me warn you, you must decide whether you will be on the right or the wrong side—oh, if you only knew at what peril you refuse to listen!"
For a moment Foley was almost frightened. Then, reminding himself of reason and reality, he said, "But, Eliaphet, are you quite sure that you yourself are doing what is right in staying here? When so much depends on you out there—Dr. Turnpenny and all. And they have sacrificed so much too. Have you thought—"
"As if I was not always thinking of it!" Sutton cried; "but I could not go back to them a Roman Catholic; they would rather I was dead. And Foley, when you judge me, remember that I have had to make sacrifices too—I have given up everything, everything! What can I do?"
A Roman Catholic! Of course he could not go back. Foley was dismayed. Why had he not foreseen it?
For a moment they stood in silence. Then Sutton turned away.
"You don't understand," he said, in a voice that his friend always remembered afterwards; "No one understands," and he went down the path alone and out of Foley's sight.