“Frances, I don’t understand a bit,” I said out loud, but said it a little humbly, for the impression the man had left was still strong upon me and I was grateful for the steady sense of peace and comfort he had somehow introduced.  The horrors had been so dreadful.  My nerves, doubtless, were more than a little overstrained.  Absurd as it must sound, I classed him in my mind with the robins, the happy, confiding robins who believed in everybody and thought no evil!  I laughed a moment at my ridiculous idea, and my sister, encouraged by this sign of patience in me, continued more fluently.

“Of course you don’t understand, Bill?  Why should you?  You’ve never thought about such things.  Needing no creed yourself, you think all creeds are rubbish.”

“I’m open to conviction—­I’m tolerant,” I interrupted.

“You’re as narrow as Sam Franklyn, and as crammed with prejudice,” she answered, knowing that she had me at her mercy.

“Then, pray, what may be his, or his Society’s beliefs?” I asked, feeling no desire to argue, “and how are they going to prove your Mabel’s salvation?  Can they bring beauty into all this aggressive hate and ugliness?”

“Certain hope and peace,” she said, “that peace which is understanding, and that understanding which explains all creeds and therefore tolerates them.”

“Toleration!  The one word a religious man loathes above all others!  His pet word is damnation—­”

“Tolerates them,” she repeated patiently, unperturbed by my explosion, “because it includes them all.”

“Fine, if true” I admitted, “very fine.  But how, pray, does it include them all?”

“Because the key-word, the motto, of their Society is, ’There is no religion higher than Truth,’ and it has no single dogma of any kind.  Above all,” she went on, “because it claims that no individual can be ‘lost.’  It teaches universal salvation.  To damn outsiders is uncivilized, childish, impure.  Some take longer than others—­it’s according to the way they think and live—­but all find peace, through development, in the end.  What the creeds call a hopeless soul, it regards as a soul having further to go.  There is no damnation—­”

“Well, well,” I exclaimed, feeling that she rode her hobby horse too wildly, too roughly over me, “but what is the bearing of all this upon this dreadful place, and upon Mabel?  I’ll admit that there is this atmosphere—­this—­er—­inexplicable horror in the house and grounds, and that if not of damnation exactly, it is certainly damnable.  I’m not too prejudiced to deny that, for I’ve felt it myself.”

To my relief she was brief.  She made her statement, leaving me to take it or reject it as I would.