Again, momentarily thrust back into himself, he wondered jealously once
more what the disillusionments had been of that experience from before
which she seemed, at times, ready to draw back a little the veil.

"A sense of futility is a sense of incompleteness," he said, "and
generally precedes a sense of power."

"Ah, you have gained that! Yet it must always have been latent in you
--you make one feel it. But now!" she exclaimed, as though the discovery
had just dawned on her, "now you will need power, now you will have to
fight as you have never fought in your life."

He found her enthusiasm as difficult to withstand as her stoicism.

"Yes, I shall have to fight," he admitted. Her partisanship was sweet.

"When you tell them what you have told me," she continued, as though
working it out in her own mind, "they will never submit to it, if they
can help it. My father will never submit to it. They will try to put
you out, as a heretic,--won't they?"

"I have an idea that they will," he conceded, with a smile.

"And won't they succeed? Haven't they the power?"

"It depends,--in the first place, on whether the bishop thinks me a
heretic."

"Have you asked him?"