Betty staid two days longer, and then went back to Allinstree, leaving mischief enough behind her. I do believe my lady meant to be just to me, but it was hard to resist the force of Betty's constant and artful insinuations, and she really came to think that I was angling for her step-son. It was not long, of course, before my lord took up the same idea, and what was worst of all, my young lord soon showed that he had no kind of objection to being angled for, and in fact was very ready and even anxious to be caught. From this time my life at the castle was not at all comfortable. I missed the companionship of Theo, of whom I had grown very fond, though she never filled Rosamond's place to me. I missed my mother more and more. Besides, my conscience was not easy. My lord and lady were good people, as I have said; but the times were times of great laxity. It was the fashion to profess great abhorrence of the Puritans and their ways, and immense devotion to the Church of England, and a good many people showed their devotion by deviating as far as possible from the ways of the precisians, as they were called. We professed to observe Sunday—that is, we all went to church in the morning, and my lady was very careful to see that all the servants were present at prayers. But my lord yawned over a play or romance all the evening when he had no one to take a hand at cards or tables with, and when we had company staying in the house the Sunday evening was as any other. My young lord had taken up the kind of infidel notions by which, as I said, some young men tried to appear intellectual at a cheap rate, and he had brought down some books of Mr. Hobbes with him which he would fain have had me read; but that I refused. I had been brought up to a strict observance of Sunday as a day of worship and of sacred rest, and at first I was shocked at what I saw. While my mother lived we usually spent our Sunday evenings together in her own room, but after her death, and especially after Dinah went away, I was easily drawn into whatever was going on below stairs, even to playing at tables with my lord, when he had no one else to amuse him. Then my old pleasure in dreams of wealth and consequence revived. I was something of an heiress, though my income was wholly dependent upon my lord's pleasure or discretion till I should be of age, and so I had plenty of attention. I began again to let the world come into my mind, and, of course, it soon gained a foothold there and ruled for the most part supreme.