This particular conversation, one of many, had, as it happened, important results on the lives of these two young creatures. Isobel, in whom the love of Truth, however ugly it might be and however destructive of hope, faith, charity and all the virtues, was a burning, inbred passion, took to the secret study of theology in order to find out why Godfrey was so convinced as to the teachings of the Bible. She was not old or mellowed enough to understand that the real reason must be discovered, not in the letter but in the spirit, that is in the esoteric meaning of the sayings as to receiving the Kingdom of Heaven like a child and the necessity of being born again. Therefore with a fierce intensity, thrusting aside the spirit and its promptings which perhaps are shadows of the only real truths, she wrestled with the letter. She read the Divines, also much of the Higher Criticism, the lives of Saints, the Sacred Books themselves and many other things, only to arise bewildered, and to a great extent unbelieving. “Why should I believe what I cannot prove?” she cried in her heart, and once with her lips to Godfrey. He made her a very wise answer, although at the moment it did not strike either of them in that light. “When you tell me of anything that you can really prove, I will show you why,” he said. To this he added a suggestion that was most unwise, namely, that she should consult his father. Now Mr. Knight was, it is true, a skilled theologian of a certain, narrow school and learned in his way. It is probable, however, that in all the wide world it would have been difficult to find any man less sympathetic to a mind like Isobel’s or more likely to antagonize her eager and budding intelligence. Every doubt he met with intolerant denial; every argument with offensive contradiction; every query with references to texts.