I was glad when I found myself safely outside the door, and I rushed into the hall as though I were being pursued; yet the oddest part of my feeling was, that whoever thus pursued me, did so out of love, not enmity, and that I was almost wrong in running away.

I leaned for a moment against one of the columns in the hall, trying to calm the excited beating of my heart, when a deep voice startled me: "So! you are agitated and alarmed! Unbelief is easily scared!" I looked up and met the calm eyes of Heliobas.

He appeared to be taller, statelier, more like a Chaldean prophet or king than I had ever seen him before.

There was something in his steady scrutiny of my face that put me to a sort of shame, and when he spoke again it was in a tone of mild reproof.
"You have been led astray, my child, by the conflicting and vain opinions of mankind.

You, like many others in the world, delight to question, to speculate, to weigh this, to measure that, with little or no profit to yourself or your fellow-creatures.