"Then what," continued Miss Bishop decisively, "has he to do with a cross and candlesticks? It's all very well, Vicar, but that's the thin end of the wedge. You know it as well as I do. His work is the saving of souls, and that sort of thing never saved a soul yet. Is that not so?"
"I'm afraid you're only too right," admitted Mr. Kestern. "It's a great pity—a great pity."
"A pity! I should call it something worse than that," retorted the lady.
Paul's mind was busy. He was recalling the chapel at St. Mary's in the early mornings, and the remote, austere, moving little service enacted there on Sundays before a cross and candlesticks. For the life of him he had to say something.
"Miss Bishop," he said, "do you think, nowadays, a cross always leads to Rome? There is one on the Table at St. Mary's."
"And how much Gospel have you heard preached there?" she demanded, shrewdly.
"Yes, Paul, that's the test," said his father.
The boy hesitated. Then he equivocated. "But the cross is the sign of our faith," he said.
"Is it?" Miss Bishop was emphatic. "I do not know that it is—not, at any rate, in the sense people use the phrase. 'Christ is Risen': that's Christianity."
"The empty cross symbolises that," said Paul.