"Oh, I can't do with religion," said Ellen positively.

He spluttered a laugh that seemed to her the first irrational flaw in
something exquisitely reasonable, and ran down the dark stairs. She
attended imaginatively to the sound of his footsteps; as on her first
excited night in country lodgings the summer before she had sat up in
bed listening to horse's hooves beating through the moonlit village
street, and had thought of the ghosts of highwaymen. But this was the
ghost of an Elizabethan seaman. She could see him, bearded and with gold
rings in his ears and the lustrousness of fever in his eyes, captaining
with oaths and the rattle of arms a boat rowed by naked Indians along a
yellow waterway between green cliffs of foliage. Yes, she could not
imagine him consulting any map that was not gay with painted figures and
long scrolls.

Dazed with the wonder of him, she went back into the room, and it was a
second or two before she noticed that Mr. Philip was ramming his hat on
his head and putting on his overcoat as though he had not a moment to
lose. "You've no need to fash yourself," she told him happily. "It's not
half-past seven yet. You've got a full hour. I can run down and heat up
your chop, if you'll wait."

"Oh, spare yourself!" he begged her shortly.

She moved about the room, putting away papers and shutting drawers and
winding up the eight-day clock on the mantelpiece a clear three days
before it needed it, with a mixed motive of clearing up before her
departure and making it clean and bare as befitted a place where heroes
came to do business; and she was more than unaware that Mr. Philip was