"She tried. She wept over me as she tried, and I made an almost superhuman effort to comprehend and remember. I could not. I was flogged, I was denied food and even water. I was put in dark rooms. I was forbid all play and recreation. I went through this martyrdom year after year and I finally became stubborn and would try no longer. In the years that followed, until I was sixteen, my daily sufferings were great, but I remember them mainly for my mother's sake, who suffered with me in all I suffered. Nor am I without pity for my father. He honestly believed that in punishing me he was doing all he could to save me from everlasting punishment. Yes, sir! Do not shake your head! I have heard him praying, pleading with God, for some token of my election to His mercy. You see it was John Calvin." "John Calvin!" ejaculated Ragnor, "how is that?" "It was his awful tenets I had to learn; and when I was young I could not learn them, and when I grew older I would not learn them. My father had called me John Calvin and I detested the name. On my eighteenth birthday I asked him to have it changed. He was very angry at my request. I begged him passionately to do so. I said it ruined my life, that I could do nothing under that name. 'Give me your own name, Father,' I entreated, 'and I will try and be a good man!' "He said something to me, I never knew exactly what, but the last word was more than I could bear and my reply was an oath. Then he lifted the whip at his side and struck me." Rahal and Thora were sobbing. Ragnor looked in the youth's face with shining eyes and asked, almost in a whisper, "What did thou do?" "I had been struck often enough before to have made me indifferent, but at this moment some new strength and feeling sprang up in my heart. I seized his arms and the whip fell to the floor. I lifted it and said, 'Sir, if you ever again use a whip in place of decent words to me, I will see you no more until we meet for the judgment of God. Then I will pity you for the life-long mistake you have made.' My father looked at me with eyes I shall never forget, no, not in all eternity! He burst into agonizing prayer and weeping and I went and told mother to go to him. I left the house there and then. I had not a halfpenny, and I was hungry and cold and sick with an intolerable sense of wrong." "Father!" said Thora, in a voice broken with weeping. "Is not this enough?" And Ragnor leaned forward and took Thora's hand but he did not speak. Neither did he answer Rahal's look of entreaty. On the contrary he asked: "Then, Ian? Then, what did thou do?"