he grasped his own wrist, and then, before he was
aware, a laugh escaped him, an all but mocking laugh, unsuitable enough to the
spirit of the moment. Mr. Warricombe was startled, but looked up with a friendly
smile.
    »You fear,« he said, »that this last speculation may seem rather fanciful to
me?«
    Godwin was biting his lip fiercely, and could not command himself to
utterance of a word.
    »By no means, I assure you,« added the other. »It appeals to me very
strongly.«
    Peak rose from his chair.
    »It struck me,« he said, »that I had been preaching a sermon rather than
taking part in a conversation. I'm afraid it is the habit of men who live a good
deal alone to indulge in monologues.«
    On his return home, the sight of Bibel und Natur and his sheets of laborious
manuscript filled him with disgust. It was two or three days before he could
again apply himself to the translation. Yet this expedient had undoubtedly been
of great service to him in the matter of his relations with Mr. Warricombe.
Without the aid of Reusch he would have found it difficult to speak naturally on
the theme which drew Martin into confidences and established an intimacy between
them.
    Already they had discussed in detail the first half of the book. How a man
of Mr. Warricombe's intelligence could take grave interest in an arid exegesis
of the first chapter of Genesis, Godwin strove in vain to comprehend. Often
enough the debates were perilously suggestive of burlesque, and, when alone, he
relieved himself of the laughter he had scarce restrained. For instance, there
was that terrible thohu wabohu of the second verse, a phrase preserved from the
original, and tossed into all the corners of controversy. Was thohu wabohu the
first condition of the earth, or was it merely a period of division between a
previous state of things and creation as established by the Hexæmeron? Did light
exist or not, previous to the thohu wabohu? Then, again, what kind of days were
the three which passed before the birth of the sun? Special interest, of course,
attached to the successive theories of theology on the origin of geologic
strata. First came the theory of restitution, which explained unbiblical
antiquity by declaring that the strata belonged to a world before the Hexæmeron,
a world which had been destroyed, and succeeded by the new creation. Less
objectionable was the concordistic theory, which interprets the six days as so
many vast periods of creative activity. But Reusch himself gave