The new home life at the Vicarage brightened her wonderfully. Her reserve wore off as she grew accustomed to that friendly household. She was enraptured with Mr. Dulcimer’s library. Here, on the Vicar’s well-stocked shelves, she found those Italian poets her mother must have loved--prose writers too--quaint old romances, bound in white vellum, on curious ribbed paper, printed at Venice two hundred years ago. She spent many an hour sitting on a hassock in the sunny bow-window, with a pile of those old Italian books on the floor beside her, while the Vicar sat at his big table annotating Berkeley, or making excursions into the world of science. Here she read the Bridgewater Treatises, and got her first grand idea of the universe. Here her young mind soared away from the narrow track along which Miss Scales had conducted it, and entered the regions of poetry and delight. And here--in this sunny old room, with its walls of hooks--young Love took her by the hand, and led her across the threshold of his wonder-world. Here she first met Cyril Culverhouse, and learnt how fair a thing piety may seem in a bright young soul, eager to do some good in its generation. Religion hitherto, as interpreted by Miss Scales, had appeared to her a hard and difficult business, which no one could take to except under severest pressure--a system of punishments and penances invented for the torment of mankind. But in Cyril’s teaching how different it all seemed! Religion became a sentiment to live or die for. Without it happiness or peace of mind seemed impossible. ‘Your mother belonged to the old faith, perhaps,’ he said, one day, when they were talking of High and Low Church. Beatrix gave a faint shiver. ‘I don’t know,’ she answered, sadly. ‘Mamma never talked to me about religion. I was too young, perhaps.’ Cyril found her curiously ignorant of all that was most vital in religion, and his first interest in her arose from this very ignorance of hers. He was so glad to set her right--to get her out of the narrow Scales track, Miss Scales being essentially Low Church, and scenting Roman encroachment in an anthem or a surplice. The interest soon deepened, but he could hardly have told when it first grew into love. Perhaps that might never have come, if Beatrix’s fresh young soul had not gone out to meet his unawares, so that ere he knew himself a lover he found himself beloved. The thought was full of rapture, for at this stage of their friendship she seemed to him the most perfect among women--the lovely embodiment of youth and innocence, and noble yearnings, truthfulness, purity, all things fair and holy. But the consideration that she was Christian Harefield’s heiress dashed his joy. He saw himself in advance--branded in the sight of men--as the clerical adventurer who, under the guise of religion, had pushed his own fortune.