"Do with it? Why, show it to the Geological Society, of course, Cyril. It's the Truth, you know, dearest, and why on earth should you wish to
conceal it? The Truth shall make you perfect." Cyril looked at her with mingled astonishment and admiration. "Oh,
Netta," he answered, sighing profoundly, "if only I could take it as
quietly as you do! If only I had faith as a grain of mustard-seed! But I
have been reduced almost to abject despair by this crushing piece of
deadly evidence. It seems to me to proclaim aloud that the evolutionists
are all completely right at bottom, and that everything we have ever
loved and cherished and hoped for, turns out an utter and absolute
delusion." "Then I should say you were still bound, for all that, to accept the
evidence," said Netta quietly. "However, for my part, I may be very
stupid and silly, and all that sort of thing, you know, but it doesn't
seem to me as if it really mattered twopence either way." Cyril looked at her again with fresh admiration. That was a point of
view that had not yet even occurred to him as within the bounds of
possibility. He had gone on repeating over and over again to his
congregation and to himself that if evolution were true, religion and
morality were mere phantoms, until at last he had ceased to think any
other proposition on the subject could be even thinkable. That a man
might instantly accept the evidence of his strange fossil, and yet be
after all an indifferent honest citizen in spite of it, was an idea that
had really never yet presented itself to him. And he blushed now to
think that, in spite of all his frequent professions of utter fidelity,
Netta had proved herself at last more loyal to the Truth in both aspects
than he himself had done. Her simple little womanly faith had never
faltered for a moment in either direction. That night was a very happy one for Netta: it was a somewhat happier one
than of late, even for Cyril. He had got rid of the cloud between
himself and his wife: he had made at least one person a confidante of
his horrid secret: and, above all, he had learnt that some bold and
ruthless German geologist had taken off his own shoulders the
responsibility of announcing the dreadful discovery. Still, it was some time before Cyril quite recovered from the gloomy
view of things generally into which his chance unearthing of the strange
fossil had temporarily thrown him. Two things mainly contributed to this
result. The first was that a few Sundays later he made up his mind he ought in
common honesty to exhibit his compromising fossil to the congregation in
the upper chamber, and make a public recantation of his recent confident
but untenable statements. He did so with much misgiving, impelled by a
growing belief that after all he must trust everything implicitly to the
Truth. It cost him a pang, too, to go back upon his own deliberate
words, so lately spoken; but he faced it out, for the Truth's sake, like
an honest man, as he had always tried to be--save for those few days
when the wicked little slab of slate lay carefully hidden away in the
inmost recesses of the laboratory cupboard. To his immense surprise,
once more, the brethren seemed to think little more of it than Netta
herself had done. Perhaps they were not so logical or thorough-going as
the young professor: perhaps they had more of unquestioning faith:
perhaps they had less of solid dogmatic leaven; but in any case they
seemed singularly little troubled by the new and startling geological
discovery. However, they were all much struck by the professor's honesty
of purpose in making a straightforward recantation of his admitted
blunder; he had acted honest and honourable, they said, like a man, and
they liked him better for it in the end, than if he'd preached, and
hedged, and shilly-shallied to them about it for a whole year of Sundays
together. Now, the mere fact that his good congregation didn't mind the
fossil much reacted healthily on Cyril Milliter, who began to suspect
that perhaps after all he had been exaggerating the religious importance
of speculative opinions on the precise nature of the cosmogony. The second thing was that, shortly after the great discovery, he
happened to make the acquaintance of the brilliant young evolutionist
from London, and found to his surprise that on the whole most of their
opinions agreed with remarkable unanimity. True, the young evolutionist
was not a Gospel Evangelist, and did not feel any profound interest in
the literal or mystical interpretation of the first chapter of Genesis. But in all essentials he was as deeply spiritual as Cyril Milliter
himself; and the more Cyril saw of him and talked with him, the more did
he begin to suspect that the truth may in reality have many facets, and
that all men may not happen to see it in exactly the self-same aspect. It dawned upon him slowly that all the illumination in the world might
not be entirely confined to the narrow circle of the Gospel
Evangelists. Even those terrible evolutionists themselves, it seemed,
were not necessarily wholly given over to cutting throats or robbing
churches. They might have their desires and aspirations, their faith and
their hope and their charity, exactly like other people, only perhaps in
a slightly different and more definite direction. In the end, Cyril and
his former bugbear became bosom friends, and both worked together
amicably side by side in the self-same laboratory at the College of
Science. To this day, Professor Milliter still continues to preach weekly to the
Gospel Evangelists, though both he and they have broadened a good deal,
in a gradual and almost imperceptible fashion, with the general
broadening of ideas and opinions that has been taking place by slow
degrees around us during the last two decades. His views are no doubt a
good deal less dogmatic and a good deal more wide and liberal now than
formerly. Netta and he live happily and usefully together; and over the
mantelpiece of his neat little study, in the cottage at Mortiscombe,
stands a slab of polished slate containing a very interesting oolitic
fossil, of which the professor has learnt at last to be extremely proud,
the first discovered and most perfect existing specimen of _Archæopteryx
lithographica_. He can hardly resist a quiet smile himself, nowadays,
when he remembers how he once kept that harmless piece of pictured stone
wrapt up carefully in a folded handkerchief in his laboratory cupboard
for some weeks together, as though it had been a highly dangerous and
very explosive lump of moral dynamite, calculated to effect at one fell
swoop the complete religious and ethical disintegration of the entire
divine universe. _IN STRICT CONFIDENCE._


I.

Harry Pallant was never more desperately in love with his wife Louie
than on the night of that delightful dance at the Vernon Ogilvies'.