"Oh! don't you scoff, George," said his mother, angrily. "M. d'Estrelles was a very clever man, though he did gamble like a fool. Everybody said his memory was marvellous. He used to quote me pages out of Voltaire and the rest of them on the nights when we walked up and down the gardens at Monte Carlo, after he'd cleared himself out. He always said he didn't see why these things should be kept from women--why men shouldn't tell women exactly what they think. And I know he'd been a Catholic in his youth, so he'd had experience of both. However, I don't care about M. d'Estrelles. I want your opinions. Now, George!"--her voice would begin to break--"how can you be so unkind. You might really compose my mind a little, as the doctors say!" And through her incorrigible levity he would see for a moment the terror which always possessed her raise its head. Then it would be time for him to go and put his arm round her, and try and coax her to bed. One night, after he had taken her upstairs, he came down so wearied and irritable that he put all his letters aside, and tried to forget himself in some miscellaneous reading. His knowledge of literature was no more complete than his character. Certain modern English poets--Rossetti, Morris, Keats, and Shelley--he knew almost by heart. And in travels and biography--mostly of men of action--he had, at one time or another, read voraciously. But "the classics he had not read," as with most of us, would have made a list of lamentable length. Since his return to Ferth, however, he had browsed a good deal among the books collected by his grandfather, mostly by way of distracting himself at night from the troubles and worries of the day. On this particular night there were two books lying on his table. One was a volume of Madame de Sevigne, the other St. Augustine's "Confessions." He turned over first one, then the other. "Au reste, ma fille, une de mes grandes envies, ce serait d'etre devote; je ne suis ni an Dieu, ni an Diable; cet etat m'ennuie, quoiqu' entre nous je le trouve le plus naturel du monde. On n'est point an Diable parce qu'on craint Dieu, et qu' an fond on a un principe de religion; on n'est point a Dieu aussi, parce que sa loi paroit dure, et qu' on n'aime point a se detruire soi-meme." "Admirable!" he thought to himself, "_admirable!_ We are all there--my mother and I--three parts of mankind." But on a page of the other book he had marked these lines--for the beauty of them: "Beatus qui amat te, et amicum in te, et inimicum propter te. Solus enim nullum eorum amittit, cui omnes in illo cari sunt qui non amittitur." He hung over the fire, pondering the two utterances. "A marvellous music," he thought of the last. "But I know no more what it means than I know what a symphony of Brahms' means. Yet some say they know. Perhaps of _her_ it might be true."