Charley bowed to the Seigneur. "I do not know why I should be taken for
a Frenchman or an infidel. I speak French well, I presume, but I spoke
it from the cradle. I speak English with equally good accent," he added,
with the glimmer of a smile; for there was a kind of exhilaration in the
little contest, even with so much at stake. This miserable, silly charge
had that behind it which might open up a grave, make its dead to walk,
fright folk from their senses, and destroy their peace for ever. Yet he
was cool and thinking clearly. He measured up the Abbe in his mind,
analysed him, found the vulnerable spot in his nature, the avenue to the
one place lighted by a lamp of humanity. He leaned a hand upon the ledge
of the chimney where he stood, and said, in a low voice:

"Monsieur l'Abbe, it is sometimes the misfortune of just men to be
terribly unjust. 'For conscience sake' is another name for prejudice--
for those antipathies which, natural to us, are, at the same time, trap-
doors, for our just intentions. You, Monsieur, have a radical antipathy
to those men who are unable to see or to feel what you were privileged to
see and feel from the time of your birth. You know that you are right.
Do you think that those who do not see as you do are wicked because they
were not given what you were given? If you are right, may they, poor
folk! not be the victims of their blindness of heart--of the darkness
born with them, or of the evils that overtake them? For conscience sake,
you would crush out evil. To you an infidel--so called--is an evil-doer,
a peril to the peace of God. You drive him out from among the faithful.
You heard that a tailor of Chaudiere was an infidel. You did not prove
him one, but you, for conscience sake, are trying to remove him, by
fixing on him a crime of which he may, with slight show of reason,
be suspected. But I ask you, would you have taken the same deep interest
in setting the law upon this suspected man did you not believe him to be
an infidel?"