“Mr. Fellowes,” he began again, “my wife and I are most anxious that our children should receive all the facts and arguments in favour of Christianity before the counter arguments are put before them, and in the most reasonable and enlightened manner. We have therefore invited you to be present to-day and would feel ourselves under still one more obligation to you—” here he looked from Mr. Fellowes to his wife and so made one of them, “you who are so eminently fitted for the task—if you would make our children acquainted with the leading points in the history of religion. Would you also be so good as to direct them in their course of reading—our daughter at least, for Dacre, I believe, goes to Eton to-morrow? My wife and I have, as you know, been reluctantly obliged to relinquish our plans in this instance, owing to the pressure of strong ancestral bias which will, I fear, also compel us to allow the boy to devote himself to brutal pursuits, and finally to enter the army. His ordinary culture then in religious matters must be entrusted to the tutors of his school, who, no doubt, will fill his mind with strange vagaries. However,” he went on with a fixed melancholy look at the boy, “Dacre’s intellect is not of a high order, it matters little; but with Gwen very specially we desire your aid. We have discovered in her an unusual power of applying knowledge, and we would be glad if you would examine her from time to time, that she may have a sound and reasonable knowledge of the arguments on the one side of this very interesting question, before she considers those on the other; we may be accused,” he continued with a sigh, “and perhaps justly, of an unfair attempt to bias the girl’s mind by not arranging that the study of the opposed facts and arguments should run side by side with these. But in this matter, I fancy,” he said, with a little smile at his wife, “I fancy both my wife’s and my hereditary tendencies have rather handicapped our intelligence, I do trust with no ill-results to our children,” he added, embracing them both in one perturbed glance and sitting down rather wearily. CHAPTER XI. DURING the latter part of this discourse Mr. Fellowes had been sorting the books on the small table, and had them now arranged in two separate heaps. Gwen had been gradually edging her chair near Mrs. Fellowes and her face was alight and eager. Any new thing is always full of possibilities to a young creature moving out in all directions after experience. Besides, there was an undercurrent of quiet anxious affection running all through her father’s half-incomprehensible speech, that struck her and kept down for the moment her usual defiant attitude of mind when had up before her parents. Dacre’s reflections, whenever the paternal eye was off him, partook of the most primitive simplicity.