‘Ye says yer a man o’ larning, an’ I b’lieves ye, she began.

He was about to reply that he was only a seeker after truth, but he was checked by the knowledge that she would accept no answer she could not understand.  He fell back on the truth as it was to her, and said simply, ‘Yes.’

‘I wants to ask ye two questions; will ye answer like an honest man?’

She had laid aside all her loud rudeness, and was speaking with intense earnestness—­an earnestness that won his entire respect.

‘I will indeed answer you honestly, if I can answer.’

‘Then tell me this—­What’s the soael o’ a man?’

He stood with lips sealed, partly by surprise at the question, and partly by self-acknowledged ignorance of the answer.

‘The soael o’ a man,’ she repeated more distinctly, ’ye knows what I mean surely?’

Yes, he knew what she meant, but he knew also that his own most honest convictions hovered between a materialist philosophy and faith in the spiritual unseen.  If at that moment he could have decided between the two he would gladly have done so, for the sake of the eager woman sitting at his feet, but he knew that he did not know which was the truth.

She, still labouring under the impression that she had not made her meaning plain, endeavoured to explain.  ’Ye knows when a man dies, there’s two parts to him; one they buries, and one goes—­’ she pointed upward with her thumb, not irreverently, but as merely wishing to indicate a fact without the expense of words.

‘Yes, I understand what you mean,’ he said slowly, ’and under that theory, the soul——­’

‘Under what?’ she said sharply.

‘I mean that if you say the soul is divided from the body at death——­’

‘But it is—­ain’t it?’ she interrupted.

‘Yes, it is,’ he said, feeling that it was better to perjure himself than to shake her faith.

‘Go on,’ she said, ’for parson says the soael is the thing inside that thinks; but when a man’s luny, ye knows—­off his head like—­has he no soael then?  I’ve looked i’ the Catechis’, an’ i’ Bible, an’ i’ Prayer-book, an’ fur the life o’ me, I doaen’t know.’

‘I don’t wonder at that,’ he said, with mechanical compassion, casting about in his mind for some possible motive for her extraordinary vehemence.

He felt as certain, standing there, that this was a true woman, true to all the highest attributes of her nature, as if he had been able to weigh all the acts of her life and find none of them wanting.  In the midst of his perplexity he found time to ask himself whence he had this knowledge.  Did he read it in the lines of her face, or was it some unseen influence of her mind upon his own?  He had only time to question, not to answer, for she looked up in his face with the trust and expectation of a child, awaiting his words.