It is very remarkable how a perfectly well-principled woman will connive at what she can not approve so long as she is taken unreservedly into confidence; but when once one secret is kept back the danger of her antagonism begins; the magic draught that has lulled the vigilant Gryphon to sleep loses its potency; the guardian of the treasure awakes--more savage because conscious of a dereliction in duty--and woe to the Arimaspian! The cold, pale, chaste moon comes forth from behind the cloud, determined to reveal every iota of transgression: no farther chance of concealment here--_Reparat sua cornua Phoebe_. So, to the utmost of her small powers, Bessie did endeavor to thwart and counteract the adversary. Her line was consistently plaintive. In season and out of season she whined and wept profusely. This was the last resource of her simple strategy: when the enemy was getting too strong to be met in open field, she adopted the Dutch plan of opening the sluices and trying to drown him. It is painful to be obliged to state that the inundation did not greatly avail. As she had done from the first, Cecil declined to make any confidences, or indeed to discuss the question at all. Mr. Fullarton, too, felt keenly the defection of a promising proselyte. Since that unfortunate afternoon Miss Tresilyan had been perfectly civil, but always very cold; and he could not but be aware that he had lost ground then that he never could hope to regain. The divine must have been very desperate when he ventured to attack that impracticable brother. It was not a judicious move; nor would any one have tried it who knew Dick Tresilyan. It was not only that he liked and admired Royston Keene, but he had a blind confidence in his sister that nothing on earth could disturb: the evidence of his own senses would not have affected it in the least. "Whatever _she_ does is right," he thought; and he clung to that idea, as many other true believers will do to a creed that they can not understand. So when the question was broached he was not very angry (for he did _more_ than justice to the chaplain's sense of duty), but he stubbornly declined to enter upon it at all. Mr. Fullarton was so provoked that he was goaded into a taunt that he ought to have been ashamed of. "Perhaps you are right," he said; "Major Keene is so formidable an adversary, that it is hardly safe to interfere with him." (These "men of peace"--_quand ils s'y prennent_! I believe the most exasperating man in England, at this moment, to be an influential Quaker.) Dick Tresilyan took a long time (as was his wont) in finding out what was meant; when he did, even his limited intellect appreciated its bad taste and absurdity. A hundred sarcasms would not have disconcerted the pastor so completely as his honest, hearty laugh.