Callandar chuckled.

“Only to your clothes, old chap.  Don’t worry.  You wouldn’t expect me to go to church in flannels?”

“I should not expect you to go to church at all.”

“Well, the fact is, old man, you are painfully ignorant.  I do go to church, and the proper church costume for a professional man is a frock coat and silk hat.  But as you are a traveller, and as you are not exactly a professional man, I shall not lose caste by taking you as you are.”

The imperturbable Willits waived the point.  “I understood you to say, also, that your watch had stopped.  Was that a joke?”

“No such luck!” The doctor took out his watch and shook it.  “Mainspring gone, I’m afraid!”

“A month ago,” said the professor, “if your watch had stopped you would have had a fit.”

“Really!  Was I ever such an ass?  Well, I’m not the slave of my watch any longer.  Time goes softly in Coombe.  Aren’t you glad I’m not taking a fit?”

“I am glad.  But I want to understand.”

“Then let’s return to the ‘Pilgrim’s Progress.’  Ann and I were talking about it this morning.  Do you remember the man with the pack on his back and how when he reached a certain spot the pack, seemingly without effort of his own, fell off and was seen no more?”

Willits reflected.  The doctor was thoroughly in earnest now.  “I seem to recollect the incident to which you refer,” he said after a pause.  “If I remember rightly it is an allegory and is used in a definitely religious sense.  The man with the pack meets a certain spiritual crisis.  Do I understand that you—­er—­that you have experienced conversion?  I am not guilty of speaking lightly of so important a matter, but I hardly know how to frame my question.”

The doctor tilted back his chair and looked dreamily out of the window.  “I did not mean you to take my illustration literally.  My religious beliefs are very much the same as they have always been.  To a materialist like you they seem, I know, absurdly orthodox; to a church member in good standing they might seem fatally lax; but such as they are I have not changed them.  Still, I was, as you know, a man with a burden.  You may call the burden consequence or what you will, the name doesn’t matter.  The weight of that youthful, selfish, unpardonable act which bound a young girl to me without giving her the protection which that bond demanded, was always upon me, crushing out the joy of life.  The news of her death made no difference, except to render me hopeless of ever making up to her for the wrong I had done.  Her death did not set me free, it bound me closer.

“I seemed like one caught in the tow of some swift tide, always fighting to get back, yet eternally being drawn away.  The tide still flows out, for the tide of human life is the only tide which never returns, but I have ceased to struggle.  I no longer look back.  It is not that God has forgiven me (I have never been able to think of God as otherwise than forgiving), it is that I have forgiven myself.”