that these learned ladies will endeavor to cajole you out of the divine steed, so that he may be added to their trained pets—”

“Oh! oh, indeed!” said Gerald. “But that is nonsense. The rider upon Kalki, and none other, has to fulfil that estimable old prophecy: and a deal of good such wheedlings will do any woman breathing, with a fine kingdom like that of mine set against a mere kiss or, it may be, a few tears!”

“That matter remains to be attested in due time. Meanwhile, I can but repeat that if you do not render a man’s homage to the ruler of this place there is no doubt whatever that the slighted goddess will avenge herself.”

“Sir,” Gerald now replied, with appropriate dignity, “I am, as were my fathers before me, a member of the Protestant Episcopal church. Is it thinkable that a communicant of this persuasion would worship a goddess of the benighted heathen? Do you but answer me that very simple question!”

“In Lichfield,” Horvendile retorted, “to adhere to the religion of your fathers is tactful, and in this place also, as in every other place, tactfulness ought to be every wise man’s religion. Otherwise, you will be running counter to that which is expected of the descendants of Manuel and of Jurgen; and you may by and by have cause to regret it.”

But Gerald thought of his church, and of its handsome matters of faith in the way of organ music and of saints’ days and of broad-mindedness and of delightful lawn-sleeved bishops and of majestic rituals. He thought of newly washed choir-boys and of his prayer-book’s wonderful mouth-filling phrases, of rogation days and of ember days and of Trinity Sunday. He thought about pulpits and hassocks and stained glass and sextons, and about the Thirty-nine Articles, and about those unpredictable, superb mathematics which early in every spring collaborated with the new moon to afford him an Easter: and these things Gerald could not abandon.

So he said: “No. No, Horvendile! I pay no homage to the wrinkled goddess.”

Then Horvendile warned him again, “You may find that decision costly.”

“That is as it may be!” said Gerald, with his chin well up. “For a good Episcopalian, sir, finds in the petulance of no heathen goddess anything to blench the cheek and make the heart go pitapat.”

Still, he looked rather fondly through the dusk. And now his shoulders also went up, shruggingly.

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