"How can you invite the enlightened nineteenth century to accept the idea of a godhead that is anything else than an abstraction?" continued the weak male voice. "Why, to personify your god is to limit him. How can a god be limited?"

"Bravo, old Tribe!" cried a boy's voice, "that's a jolly good point. Now what have you got to say to that, Malster?"

"To understand him at all," replied the arrogant voice, which Lord Henry now concluded must be Denis Malster's, "is in any case to limit him to the compass of your understanding, even if that can only grasp a monkey on a stick; so why not proceed to personal limitations at once? It makes things much easier for the bulk of humanity, and it also makes love and fear, and therefore morality possible. Without a personal god you feel as if you are dealing only with a natural element, or natural law. But who minds if the sea watched him while he picks his neighbour's pocket? Who cares that the sky is overhearing him when he courts and kisses his neighbour's wife?"

The remark provoked wild outbursts of laughter, followed by the weak voice, which said, "Don't, Agnes, don't fidget! Leave my coat-sleeve alone!"

Lord Henry having formed a fairly accurate estimate of the situation, and realising that little Mrs. Tribe was evidently miserable, felt he could endure it no longer. In any case Malster was having it too much his own way with his chorus of sympathetic females, and so, turning towards the group in the bower, the young nobleman advanced a few paces towards them.

"Forgive me," he began, "but the subject of your discussion, which I could scarcely help overhearing, interests me enormously. Might I be allowed to join in it too?"

Nobody recognised him. From the refined, gentle manner of his speech, he might have been one of the local vicars taking a stroll. Only Malster stirred, as if he felt there was something oddly familiar about the speaker, but seeing that he had no reason to suppose that Lord Henry was anywhere within twenty miles of the place, the identity of the stranger did not immediately occur to him. There was a pause, and then Malster said:

"Move up a bit, Leo! Yes, certainly, sir; we should be glad if you would."

"I'm tired," said the sweet soft female voice, which Lord Henry, as he sat down, realised that he had rightly ascribed to Mrs. Tribe, "I want to go indoors."

"One moment," said the weak voice, which had now become more than usually agitated.

"To begin with," Lord Henry said, "I should like to join issue most violently with the gentleman who has been arguing in favour of a personal god. Nothing,--in the last two centuries has been more fatal to Europe and humanity than this."

There was a general movement as if the whole party wished to draw closer to the speaker, and Stephen Fearwell, who was leaning against one of the outside uprights of the bower, swung round until his head was well inside the shelter.

"Good man!" he ejaculated enthusiastically, as he performed this movement. And Lord Henry recognised his voice as that of the boy who had previously endeavoured to support Gerald Tribe. It was evident that he could feel no deep concern about the issue. He merely wanted Gerald Tribe to get an innings for once against Malster.

"You see, as the supporter of a personal god has very truly pointed out," continued Lord Henry, "the morality of any race, or nation, or group of nations, who believe in a personal god, comes ultimately to derive its authority from the will of that personal god."

"Quite so!" said Denis in the same arrogant tone he had used all the time.

"Yes, but with what result?" Lord Henry demanded.

"With the result--" began the Incandescent Gerald.

"Leave it to him, you silly!" whispered the soft, sweet, female voice with some eagerness. It was clear that Mrs. Tribe had suddenly changed her mind about going to bed.

"With the result," continued Lord Henry emphatically, "that the moment the belief in the personal god declines, as on analysis it must decline, morality declines with it. For morality in such cases is bound up, as you say, with the belief in a personal god. Civilisation, in fact, is once again on the rocks and society is no longer safe--why? Because by making your moral code issue from the lips of your personal god, it has become so much waste paper now that your personal god is beginning to be felt as an absurdity. Thus in a religion with a personal god, heresy always kills two birds with one stone. But once the bird morality is killed, it takes a new civilisation and a new culture to hatch another one. Man can survive without a belief in a personal god; he cannot survive without a morality."

"But a personal god," objected Denis, "is omniscient, all-seeing. He is assumed to know all men's actions, and they dare not do wrong precisely because they know he is watching them. That surely is the best safeguard to decent conduct; it is in fact the meaning of conscience!"

"Yes, I was coming to that point," said Lord Henry gravely, "and what is the outcome of the thousands of years of belief in this omniscient god, who can see all men's action? Why, sir, whoever you are," Lord Henry exclaimed, his voice swelling with indignation, "the result is that to-day things have come to such a pass that it is scarcely possible to trust one man or woman in the whole of these islands to do the right thing against their own interests, when your god, and your god alone is their witness. That is the state to which your belief in an omniscient personal god has reduced us, and you know that what I say is true."

The Incandescent Gerald was so jubilant that he wished to laugh outright; but his keen eager wife prevented him. She had no wish to save the feelings of her husband's tormentor, but she was too much fascinated and spellbound by what she had been able to divine of Lord Henry's personality to brook the coarse interruption. Leonetta and Vanessa were beginning to be conscious of this feeling too, and stared eagerly through the darkness to try to catch a glimpse of the powerful stranger.

"People have got so used to violating even the most elementary principles of savage morality," continued Lord Henry, "without the thunder of your almighty descending on their heads, that there is scarcely a man or woman in Europe to-day who really fears your god as their only witness, who really troubles about your god as their only witness, or who even gives him a passing thought, when they stand absolutely alone before the temptation to perpetrate some mean, despicable or dishonourable action."

Lord Henry was at his best. His words were uttered with extreme precision, his manner was emphatic and passionate, and his mysterious presence in the party only magnified the impression that these characteristics made upon his listeners.

"May I ask who you are?" Denis Malster demanded, leaning forward in the darkness.

"Certainly," replied Lord Henry suavely. "I am Lord Henry Highbarn. I have come here this evening for a rest and a change."

A stillness as of death fell on the party, and the excited breathing of all present could be heard.

"I thought I knew you," Denis exclaimed at last, recovering from the unpleasant shock the announcement had given him. "But I couldn't for the life of me think who you could be."

"Do they know you are here?" Leonetta gasped.

"I presume so," said Lord Henry, "my luggage was taken up about an hour ago."

He rose, and immediately the rest of the party did likewise. Out on the bank of the Sprigg, in the moonlight, Denis then proceeded to introduce all those present, and the whole gathering slowly crossed the bridge and moved towards the house.

Lord Henry, with Denis on his left and Leonetta on his right, was in the van, but the others clustered round as closely as they could, and conversation was general.

Women of whatever station in life and from whatever clime, have a very acute sense of strength and power in the opposite sex. If modern society has dispensed with the arena and with the tilting jousts of chivalry, it has nevertheless not deadened either women's passion for the tournament, or the keenness with which they divine the merits of their respective knights. And if argument is the only remaining form in which that clash of arms of olden times is witnessed by them to-day, it is with no diminished interest or perspicuity that they register its results.

Ordinary games hardly meet all the demands of the true joust; for, in the first place, they do not include to the same extent as argument, that formidable element in modern knightly equipment, the intellect; and, secondly, because to the most thick-skinned there is something so much more mortifying, ignominious, and humiliating in being beaten in argument than in losing a game, that argument still retains, though in an attenuated and spiritualised form, something of the excitement and gravity of armed conflict.

Denis Malster was well aware of all this,--indeed had he not thrown down his gauntlet every night to the Incandescent Gerald precisely because he knew how well he himself looked in the lists, and how well he tilted? But perhaps Lord Henry was even better aware than Denis of the important part played by intellectual male conflict in the presence of women; and he moreover realised more certainly than Denis could possibly have guessed, the precise effect on the female mind of repeated victories in this modern and polite form of tournament.

Certainly as Leonetta, Vanessa, Agatha, and Mrs. Tribe hastened their footsteps to catch every word that fell from Lord Henry's lips, they were largely animated by the natural curiosity provoked by the presence of a distinguished stranger; but in their eagerness to get close up to him and to be in constant earshot of his voice, there was also the tacit admission, possibly unrealised by any of them as yet, that in him they had recognised a knight of peculiar power and of brilliant style.

They had not concerned themselves with the merits of the actual point that had been at issue. All they felt was that a certain speaker had spoken, not as one of the scribes, but as one having authority, and that the former champion of the lists had for once been worsted in their presence.

All this was in the air, unuttered, and even imperfectly present in unconsciousness. Only Denis Malster, a little uneasy and a little resentful, and Lord Henry, as usual perfectly serene and urbane, could have accurately explained what had taken place.

Lord Henry had been right. Cleopatra had given up. Jaded by the unremitting exertions of a week's struggle for supremacy with her sister, quite unable to face another week of similarly exhausting effort, and unwilling to acknowledge herself defeated, illness had come almost as a boon, almost as an angel of mercy. Something seemed to have snapped inside her,--her main-spring it appeared to be; and now she hugged her ailment, her weakness, or whatever it was, because it seemed to offer her the chance of a graceful retreat before her ebbing forces compelled her to surrender.

She did not come to breakfast now, and retired early. She half hoped, perhaps, that the very air of fragility and pathetic languor, which she had half consciously adopted, would draw even keener attention than had her former attitude of robust equality with her sister. Vanity is full of resources when it is wounded. But her attacks of sudden faintness she could not control; they represented the only genuine feature of her indisposition,--at least they, and the continued insomnia which was an important symptom.

On the first evening of his visit, therefore, Lord Henry did not see her, neither did she know as she tossed about in her bed at "The Fastness" that he was anywhere within call. Instinctively she felt that her mother's deep sympathy and anxiety to help were with her, but it never occurred to her that the maternal devotion to her would ever extend to extreme measures.

Meanwhile Lord Henry was quietly taking stock of everybody at Brineweald Park. An hour in the drawing-room there, after his walk in the grounds, supplied him with much useful information; and by the time the car arrived to take the Delarayne household back to "The Fastness," he had already formed certain very valuable conclusions.

It was clear to him that Denis Malster was head and shoulders above the other men of the party, and but for a certain priggishness of manner which, though offensive, was not altogether unamenable to correction, by far the most attractive English male he had seen for some time. He had almost forgotten their first encounter at the Inner Light meeting, and was more favourably impressed than he had expected to be by the young man who had quite evidently been the cause of Mrs. Delarayne's domestic troubles.

Conversely, the impression Lord Henry had made upon Denis Malster had been unfavourable in the extreme. Here was a man who could not be relied upon to be the same two days running. On the occasion of his first visit to Bullion Ltd. he had looked a vagabond; his clothes had hung in shapeless folds about his body, completely concealing whatever symmetry it might have possessed.

Denis remembered the faded green tie and the badly fitting collar he had seen Lord Henry wearing at the Inner Light meeting, the same green tie and badly fitting collar in which the young nobleman had had the simplicity to be photographed for the _Bystander_ only a few weeks previously,--and filled with consternation at the unaccountable metamorphosis compared it with Lord Henry's present elegant neck-gear.

It was monstrous to be so unreliable, monstrous to be so saltatory, so capricious, as to upset other people's surest reckonings.

On the following morning it was obvious that Denis had made a supreme effort. It was an effect in white flannels with a superb foulard tie of navy blue and wonderful white buckskin shoes. He reached the breakfast-table at Brineweald Park unusually early, so eager was he to discover what further sartorial devilry Lord Henry would be guilty of, and he was not a little disappointed to find only Guy Tyrrell down.

"Hullo Malster!" cried Guy, looking up from a partly consumed dish of pork chop. "What the hell's up,--are you going to be married?"

"Don't be an ass!" Denis replied, helping himself to devilled kidneys.

"You're looking a howling swell this morning," continued the junior secretary.