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. CHAPTER XIII. THE very air of Gwen’s two rooms, the bedroom and the dressing-room off it, shimmered with excitement. It glowed in the soft light of the innumerable wax candles with which Mary had studded the tables, it hung in the rose-pink curtains, it shone in the leaping blue flame of the fire, it was everywhere and most inconveniently so in the fingers of the new lady’s maid, a creature of sentiment, who was putting the finishing touches to her young mistress’s bodice, while Mary was trotting round restlessly, disturbed in every individual hair of her head, casting rapt glances at Gwen and furtive ones at the door. At the sound of a footstep on the stairs she gave a sudden start and her face lighted, but it shaded as suddenly. “Only Mrs. Fellowes!” she murmured, and she showed her in with some grimness.