By means of much gentle questioning, herself often suggesting the answers, Mrs. Churton gradually drew from the girl an account of all she knew and thought about sacred subjects. She was shocked and grieved to discover that this young lady from the metropolis was in a state of ignorance with regard to such subjects that would have surprised her in any cottage child among the poor she was accustomed to visit in the neighbourhood. The names of the Creator and of the Saviour were certainly familiar to Fan; from her earliest childhood she had heard them spoken with frequency in her old Moon Street home. But that was all. Her mother had taught her nothing--not even to lisp, when she was small, the childish rhyme: Now I lay me down to sleep, I pray the Lord my soul to keep. Her Scripture lessons at the Board School had powerfully impressed her, but in a confused and unpleasant way. Certain portions of the historical narrative affected her with their picturesque grandeur, and fragments remained in her memory; the Bible and religion generally came to be associated in her mind with dire wrath, and war, and the shedding of blood, with ruin of cities and tribulations without end. It was processional--a great confused host covered with clouds of dust, shields and spears, and brass and scarlet, and noise of chariot-wheels and blowing of trumpets--an awful pageant fascinating and terrifying to contemplate. And when she stood still, a little frightened, to see a horde of Salvationists surge past her in the street, with discordant shouting and singing, waving of red flags and loud braying of brass instruments, this seemed to her a kind of solemn representation of those ancient and confused doings she had read about; beyond that it had no meaning. Before her mother's death she had sometimes gone to St. Michael's Church on wet or cold or foggy winter evenings; for in better weather it was always overcrowded, and the vergers--a kind of mitigated policemen, Fan thought them--would hunt her away from the door. For in those days she was so ragged and such a sad-looking object, and they doubtless knew very well what motive she had in going there. She had gone there only because it was warm and dry, and the decorations and vestments, the singing and the incense, were sweet to her senses; but what she had heard had not enlightened her.