“Do you seriously think she will break it off?” asked Strong incredulously.

“I feel surer than ever,” answered his aunt.  “The criticism is going to be bitter, and the longer Esther waits, the more sharply people will talk.  I should not wonder if it ended by driving Mr. Hazard out of the parish.  He is not strong enough to shock them much.  Then Esther is growing more and more nervous every day because the more she tries to understand, the less she succeeds.  Yesterday, when I took her to drive, she was in tears about the atonement, and to-day I suppose she will have gone to bed with a sick headache on account of the Athanasian creed.”

“I must talk with her,” said Strong.  “I think I can make some of those things easier for her.”

“You?  I thought you laughed at them all.”

“So I do, but not because they can’t be understood.  The trouble is that I think I do understand them.  Mystery for mystery science beats religion hollow.  I can’t open my mouth in my lecture-room without repeating ten times as many unintelligible formulas as ever Hazard is forced to do in his church.  I can quiet her mind on that score.”

“You had better leave it alone, George!  Why should you meddle?  Let Mr. Hazard fight his own battles!”

George refused to take this wise advice.  He was a tender-hearted fellow and could not bear to see his friends suffer.  If Esther loved Hazard and wanted to marry him, she should do so though every dogma of the church stood in her way, and every old woman in the parish shrieked sacrilege.  Strong had no respect for the church and no wish to save it trouble, but he believed that Hazard was going blindly under Esther’s influence which would sooner or later end by drawing him away from his old forms of belief; and as this was entirely Hazard’s affair, if he chose to risk the danger, Strong chose to help him.

“Why not?” said Strong to himself.  “It is not a question of earning a living.  Both of them are well enough off.  If he can turn her into a light of his church, let him do it.  If she ends in dragging him out of the church, so much the better.  She can’t get a better husband, and he can’t find a better wife.  I mean to see this thing through.”

So George strolled round to Esther’s house after this interview with his aunt, thinking that he might be able to do good.  Being at home there, he went up-stairs unannounced, and finding no one in the library he climbed to the studio, where, on opening the door, he saw Catherine sitting before the fire, looking very much bored.  Poor Catherine found it hard to keep up with life in New York.  Fresh from the prairie, she had been first saturated with art, and was now plunged in a bottomless ocean of theology.  She was glad to see Strong who had in her eyes the advantage of being more practical than the rest of her friends.

“Catherine, how are your sheep?”

“I am glad you have come to look after them,” answered Catherine.  “I won’t be watch-dog much longer.  They are too troublesome.”