"Then she is better?"

"I confess I am a little anxious about her. But I ought not to be
dawdling like this, with half my patients to see. I must bid you good
morning.--Good morning, Mrs. Bevis."

As he spoke, Faber drew rein, and let the carriage pass; then turned his
horse's head to the other side of the way, scrambled up the steep bank
to the field above, and galloped toward Glaston, whose great church rose
high in sight. Over hedge and ditch he rode straight for its tower.

"The young fool!" said the rector, looking after him admiringly, and
pulling up his horses that he might more conveniently see him ride.

"Jolly old fellow!" said the surgeon at his second jump. "I wonder how
much he believes now of all the rot! Enough to humbug himself with--not
a hair more. He has no passion for humbugging other people. There's that
curate of his now believes every thing, and would humbug the whole world
if he could! How any man can come to fool himself so thoroughly as that
man does, is a mystery to me!--I wonder what the rector's driving into
Glaston for on a Saturday."

Paul Faber was a man who had espoused the cause of science with all the
energy of a suppressed poetic nature. He had such a horror of all kinds
of intellectual deception or mistake, that he would rather run the risk
of rejecting any number of truths than of accepting one error. In this
spirit he had concluded that, as no immediate communication had ever
reached his eye, or ear, or hand from any creator of men, he had no
ground for believing in the existence of such a creator; while a