But the healthy and Christian surroundings of the home to which she came were not without their influence. Mrs. Varian's sweet endurance of her life-long suffering, St. John's healthy goodness, and Missy's vigorous duty-doing, helped her, against her will. St. John was her great object of interest in life. All her money was to go to him, and she actually felt compensated for her dull and restricted existence, sometimes, when she reflected that it swelled, by so many thousand a year, the fortune that would be his. She had not lost her interest in the world, since she had him to connect her with it, and to give her an excuse for the indulgence of ambition. Of course she had been bitterly set against all the system upon which he had been educated, and would have thwarted it if she had had the power. His entering the church had been a great trial to her, but she openly said it was his mother's plan, and no wish of his, and before he was ordained he would be old enough to see the folly of it, and to get clear of it. Then came his engagement, and at this she was wroth indeed, but as it furnished her with liberal weapons against his disappointed mother, she found her own comfort in it. Now she hoped Dorla would see the folly of her course; now she could understand what other people had known all along: simply that she was keeping him in a false and unhealthy state of religious feeling, that she had forced upon him duties and aspirations all her own and none of his; that there had come a reaction, that there was a flat failure when he came to see even a corner of the world from which she had debarred him. Here he was, carried away by his infatuation for a woman whom he would have been too wise to choose if his mother had not tried to make a monk of him, and to keep him as guileless and ignorant as a girl. Here he was bound to a woman who would ruin his career, spoil his life for him, spend his money, disgrace his name; and it was "all the work of his mother." These were some of the amenities of the family life at Yellowcoats. These were the certain truths that were spoken of and to Mrs. Varian by her candid and unprejudiced sister-in-law.