"No," she added, "I don't
know him--beyond the fact that he is a leader in the Movement and has
devoted years and money to its objects. Mabel felt the same thing in him
that you have felt--and jumped at it." "But you've seen him before?" I urged, for the certainty was in me that
he was no stranger to her. She shook her head. "He called one day early this week, when you were
out. Mabel saw him. I believe--" she hesitated a moment, as though
expecting me to stop her with my usual impatience of such subjects--"I
believe he has explained everything to her--the beliefs he embodies, she
declares, are her salvation--might be, rather, if she could adopt them." "Conversion again!" For I remembered her riches, and how gladly a
Society would gobble them. "The layers I told you about," she continued calmly, shrugging her
shoulders slightly--"the deposits that are left behind by strong
thinking and real belief--but especially by ugly, hateful belief,
because, you see--unfortunately there's more vital passion in that
sort--"

"Frances, I don't understand a bit," I said out loud, but said it a
little humbly, for the impression the man had left was still strong upon
me and I was grateful for the steady sense of peace and comfort he had
somehow introduced. The horrors had been so dreadful. My nerves,
doubtless, were more than a little overstrained. Absurd as it must
sound, I classed him in my mind with the robins, the happy, confiding
robins who believed in everybody and thought no evil! I laughed a moment
at my ridiculous idea, and my sister, encouraged by this sign of
patience in me, continued more fluently. "Of course you don't understand, Bill? Why should you? You've never
thought about such things. Needing no creed yourself, you think all
creeds are rubbish." "I'm open to conviction--I'm tolerant," I interrupted. "You're as narrow as Sam Franklyn, and as crammed with prejudice," she
answered, knowing that she had me at her mercy. "Then, pray, what may be his, or his Society's beliefs?" I asked,
feeling no desire to argue, "and how are they going to prove your
Mabel's salvation? Can they bring beauty into all this aggressive hate
and ugliness?" "Certain hope and peace," she said, "that peace which is understanding,
and that understanding which explains all creeds and therefore tolerates
them." "Toleration! The one word a religious man loathes above all others! His
pet word is damnation--"

"Tolerates them," she repeated patiently, unperturbed by my explosion,
"because it includes them all." "Fine, if true" I admitted, "very fine. But how, pray, does it include
them all?" "Because the key-word, the motto, of their Society is, 'There is no
religion higher than Truth,' and it has no single dogma of any kind. Above all," she went on, "because it claims that no individual can be
'lost.' It teaches universal salvation. To damn outsiders is
uncivilized, childish, impure. Some take longer than others--it's
according to the way they think and live--but all find peace, through
development, in the end. What the creeds call a hopeless soul, it
regards as a soul having further to go. There is no damnation--"

"Well, well," I exclaimed, feeling that she rode her hobby horse too
wildly, too roughly over me, "but what is the bearing of all this upon
this dreadful place, and upon Mabel? I'll admit that there is this
atmosphere--this--er--inexplicable horror in the house and grounds, and
that if not of damnation exactly, it is certainly damnable. I'm not too
prejudiced to deny that, for I've felt it myself." To my relief she was brief. She made her statement, leaving me to take
it or reject it as I would. "The thought and belief its former occupants--have left behind. For
there has been coincidence here, a coincidence that must be rare. The
site on which this modern house now stands was Roman, before that Early
Britain, with burial mounds, before that again, Druid--the Druid stones
still lie in that copse below the field, the Tumuli among the ilexes
behind the drive. The older building Sam Franklyn altered and
practically pulled down was a monastery; he changed the chapel into a
meeting hall, which is now the music room; but, before he came here, the
house was occupied by Manetti, a violent Catholic without tolerance or
vision; and in the interval between these two, Julius Weinbaum had it,
Hebrew of most rigid orthodox type imaginable--so they all have left
their--"

"Even so," I repeated, yet interested to hear the rest, "what of it?" "Simply this," said Frances with conviction, "that each in turn has left
his layer of concentrated thinking and belief behind him; because each
believed intensely, absolutely, beyond the least weakening of any doubt
--the kind of strong belief and thinking that is rare anywhere today, the
kind that wills, impregnates objects, saturates the atmosphere, haunts,
in a word. And each, believing he was utterly and finally right, damned
with equally positive conviction the rest of the world. One and all
preached that implicitly if not explicitly. It's the root of every
creed. Last of the bigoted, grim series came Samuel Franklyn." I listened in amazement that increased as she went on. Up to this point
her explanation was so admirable. It was, indeed, a pretty study in
psychology if it were true. "Then why does nothing ever happen?" I enquired mildly. "A place so
thickly haunted ought to produce a crop of no ordinary results!" "There lies the proof," she went on in a lowered voice, "the proof of
the horror and the ugly reality. The thought and belief of each occupant
in turn kept all the others under. They gave no sign of life at the
time. But the results of thinking never die. They crop out again the
moment there's an opening. And, with the return of Mabel in her negative
state, believing nothing positive herself the place for the first time
found itself free to reproduce its buried stores. "Damnation, hell-fire, and the rest--the most permanent and vital
thought of all those creeds, since it was applied to the majority of the
world--broke loose again, for there was no restraint to hold it back. Each sought to obtain its former supremacy. None conquered. There
results a pandemonium of hate and fear, of striving to escape, of
agonized, bitter warring to find safety, peace--salvation. The place is
saturated by that appalling stream of thinking--the terror of the
damned. It concentrated upon Mabel, whose negative attitude furnished
the channel of deliverance. You and I, according to our sympathy with
her, were similarly involved. Nothing happened, because no one layer
could ever gain the supremacy." I was so interested--I dare not say amused--that I stared in silence
while she paused a moment, afraid that she would draw rein and end the
fairy tale too soon. "The beliefs of this man, of his Society rather, vigorously thought and
therefore vigorously given out here, will put the whole place straight. It will act as a solvent.