Dacre had been shot through Eton into Sandhurst, and Gwen was fast growing up and imbibing religious instruction in precisely the fashion one might have expected from her surroundings and her turn of mind.

She received the facts as facts, and got very keen and eager over those that had any dramatic interest in them. She dug into their depths and revelled in them as any other boy or girl of sound intellectual capacity would do, when they were put as Mr. Fellowes put them. The unsatisfactory part of the business was when the horrible critical faculty of the girl began to ransack the facts and the theories hung on them, and to turn them inside out, and to compare and classify them with an honest downright unscrupulousness that no girl suckled on the Bible could ever, no matter what her opinions might be, or rather her own opinion of her opinions, find it in her heart to use, and the summing up of Gwen’s searchings and comparings was monotonous and commonplace enough.

“The whole scheme is very fine,” she said one day, “it is a perfect idyll in its way, and divine from the mere exaltation and grandeur of it, but where any proof of a personal God comes in I can’t see, any more than in any of the other creeds. They all seem to be chips off the same block. The ideal God seems universally human—this Jewish one with the rest. He is feeble and tyrannical and He, in the Old Testament, is so inconsistent; and in the New—well, after all, that is only rather a more modern reflection of the Old. As for Christ, we know so little of Him,—and then when all’s said His loveliest and best thoughts were also thought in the Vedas by the Brahmins. It is wonderful beyond comprehension to me how so many have lived and died for such myths. The greatest and divinest quality of God seems to me to be His inexorableness, and even that failed Him more than once at a pinch.”

“It is a sense wanting in me,” she often told Mr. Fellowes; “the sense of religion, as in Dacre the sense of poetry, you can’t supply it, no one can. I lose an infinite deal, I know, your face literally shining over these things tells me so, plainer than a thousand words. I would give anything to experience such rapture, which is itself divine, but I couldn’t to save my life—it’s curious!”

“Dacre tells me,” she began suddenly another day, “that he quite believes in Christianity. Now, if his shallow feeble acceptance of the thing—and he says it is just like all the other fellows’ beliefs,—is accepted, average Christianity must be poor stuff. I will wait until I get a better hold on it than that, before I say anything definite about believing or disbelieving. I say merely, the scheme does not appeal to me, the fault is in myself no doubt, your judgment is sound in all other things, I quite believe it is just as sound in this.”

On her seventeenth birthday, Mr. and Mrs. Fellowes gave her an edition of Browning.

“The parts she understands will be a revelation to her,” Mr. Fellowes said, “and those she doesn’t will serve as a brain tonic, for she will be sure to thresh them out with blood-curdling thoroughness.”

They were all this and more, as Mr. Fellowes felt to his cost when a few days later she brought him Caliban on Cetebos.

“Now here,” she said, “is my exact impression of the Christian God. I wonder if I shall ever change it, and by what process? I must be in a horribly unfinished initial state if I can think side by side with a brutal creature like that. It’s queer,—I am not altogether like him in other respects,” she added with a laugh.

Mr. Fellowes answered her, as he always did, with perfect good humour and sound good sense.

It was hard, uphill, melancholy work for him, but he did it like a man, and as well as he knew how—he tried to hope, and left the rest with God.

Mrs. Fellowes did her little part as soon as the solemnities were at an end. She seized on the girl and petted and made much of her, and opened out her mother’s heart to her.

“She must learn what love is, then perhaps she will stop prying about after justice and other matters. Besides, it is absolutely necessary she should before she has children of her own. She must be bathed in it, so that she actually has to absorb it like children do nourishment in their bath of veal broth. I shall keep driving it into her at every possible opportunity. It would be an awful satisfaction if just once in a while she would let one get a real good glimpse into her, to see how it works. I hate doing things in the dark!”

“But you do get a sight of the result sometimes. I remember myself having had several. I believe the girl has an immense power of affection.”

“Mercy on us! As if I did not know that! When it does break out an earthquake is a fool to it, but then the eruptions are always so sudden and the calming down so preternaturally swift that when they happen one is far too overwhelmed to have any time or faculty left for observation, and one never dares to go back on those outbursts, as you very well know. Oh, my Gwen, my poor, poor little Gwen, God will have to help your husband very considerably!”

And so Gwen grew up and her story began.