Mr. Cumberland Vane rolled about, laughing in a sort of relief.

"You're like a breath of April, sir," he cried. "You're ozone
after that fellow. You're perfectly right. Perhaps I have taken
the thing too seriously. I should love to see him sending you
challenges and to see you smiling. Well, well."

Evan went out of the Court of Justice free, but strangely shaken,
like a sick man. Any punishment of suppression he would have felt
as natural; but the sudden juncture between the laughter of his
judge and the laughter of the man he had wronged, made him feel
suddenly small, or at least, defeated. It was really true that
the whole modern world regarded his world as a bubble. No cruelty
could have shown it, but their kindness showed it with a ghastly
clearness. As he was brooding, he suddenly became conscious of a
small, stern figure, fronting him in silence. Its eyes were grey
and awful, and its beard red. It was Turnbull.

"Well, sir," said the editor of _The Atheist_, "where is the
fight to be? Name the field, sir."

Evan stood thunderstruck. He stammered out something, he knew not
what; he only guessed it by the answer of the other.

"Do I want to fight? Do I want to fight?" cried the furious
Free-thinker. "Why, you moonstruck scarecrow of superstition, do
you think your dirty saints are the only people who can die?
Haven't you hung atheists, and burned them, and boiled them, and
did they ever deny their faith? Do you think we don't want to
fight? Night and day I have prayed--I have longed--for an atheist