Betty, sitting in the window in the waning light, learnt from the precious volume that the poet’s name was Cartel de Maungy; and opening the book she found written upon every leaf in tuneful verse the self-revelation of the man, the poet of faded ideals, as his race had been before him--his grandsire had gone to the guillotine for a well-turned sonnet about something that did not matter. On every page was the tale of his placid devotion; his adoration of his Flora--always from a seemly distance; his vows that they should ever move in the ideal; that the touch of his lips upon her fingers is sweet marriage enough for him; in his measured singing of jewelled queens and sapphire nights and pearly dusk he holds her finger-tips reverently and but for the moment, and that only in the distant and proper measure of the gavotte or the like stately trippings to the whispered music of viol and lute and harpsichord--throughout was no coarse bucolic love-embrace. Thus the slender verse sounded its tender music until there was almost shame in the kiss that is kissed upon the mouth. The little old faded lady was possessed of an academic and dainty old-world Papist faith that æsthetically touched Betty’s sense of beauty. The child had grown up without any kind of formal religious instruction--had picked up from the air, and from straying truths in the air, her sweet concept of life. The pure metal of her quick, alert and vigorous understanding required but little hammering. Only with the lad Noll had come unrest and questioning. Major Modeyne had drifted from his Church--indeed, Betty remembered well a very severe fit of coughing that had overcome him in answer to an early childish demand of hers during a thunderstorm as to what God could find to do all day in heaven--coughing which became almost an apoplectic fit when, being unanswered, she concluded airily that the drab intercourse with pious people and the lack of good wholesome entertainment excused these outbursts of anger and violence, and no doubt led to the making of these noises and other suchlike unpleasantnesses.