“But Our Lord is God,” Mrs. Lidderdale protested.

Mark wrinkled his face in an effort to confront once more this eternal puzzle.

“Don’t you remember, darling, three Persons and one God?”

Mark sighed.

“You haven’t forgotten that clover-leaf we picked one day in Kensington Gardens?”

“When we fed the ducks on the Round Pond?”

“Yes, darling, but don’t think about ducks just now.  I want you to think about the Holy Trinity.”

“But I can’t understand the Holy Trinity, Mother,” he protested.

“Nobody can understand the Holy Trinity.  It is a great mystery.”

“Mystery,” echoed Mark, taking pleasure in the word.  It always thrilled him, that word, ever since he first heard it used by Dora the servant when she could not find her rolling-pin.

“Well, where that rolling-pin’s got to is a mystery,” she had declared.

Then he had seen the word in print.  The Coram Street Mystery.  All about a dead body.  He had pronounced it “micetery” at first, until he had been corrected and was able to identify the word as the one used by Dora about her rolling-pin.  History stood for the hard dull fact, and mystery stood for all that history was not.  There were no dates in “mystery:”  Mark even at seven years, such was the fate of intelligent precocity, had already had to grapple with a few conspicuous dates in the immense tale of humanity.  He knew for instance that William the Conqueror landed in 1066, and that St. Augustine landed in 596, and that Julius Caesar landed, but he could never remember exactly when.  The last time he was asked that date, he had countered with a request to know when Noah had landed.

“The Holy Trinity is a mystery.”

It belonged to the category of vanished rolling-pins and dead bodies huddled up in dustbins:  it had no date.

But what Mark liked better than speculations upon the nature of God were the tales that were told like fairy tales without its seeming to matter whether you remembered them or not, and which just because it did not matter you were able to remember so much more easily.  He could have listened for ever to the story of the lupinseeds that rattled in their pods when the donkey was trotting with the boy Christ and His mother and St. Joseph far away from cruel Herod into Egypt and how the noise of the rattling seeds nearly betrayed their flight and how the plant was cursed for evermore and made as hungry as a wolf.  And the story of how the robin tried to loosen one of the cruel nails so that the blood from the poor Saviour drenched his breast and stained it red for evermore, and of that other bird, the crossbill, who pecked at the nails until his beak became crossed.  He could listen for ever to the tale of St. Cuthbert who was fed by ravens, of St. Martin who cut off his cloak and gave it to a beggar, of St. Anthony who preached to the fishes, of St. Raymond who put up his cowl and floated from Spain to Africa like a nautilus, of St. Nicolas who raised three boys from the dead after they had been killed and cut up and salted in a tub by a cruel man that wanted to eat them, and of that strange insect called a Praying Mantis which alighted upon St. Francis’ sleeve and sang the Nunc Dimittis before it flew away.