He would nod and walk on, finishing his broken sentence as though nothing had intervened between subject and predicate. Although he was severe with her constitutional forgetfulness of dates, her father, at least, did not obtrude upon her the disgrace of extreme youth. He talked the gravest matters to her with an air of conferring with an equal. They discussed religion with no little openness, and, by dint of diligent inquiry, she heard, amazed, the extent of his unbelief. He had at first meant to be reticent, but as she got older and yet more inquiring, he had said: "One thing, at least, a child has a right to expect from its parents, and that is truth. I am bound, as I see the matter, to give my child as faithful an account of the world as I am able. I am the traveller coming home, of whom the young one setting forth asks the way. Shall I advise him to go in the wrong direction because the old sign-posts misled _me_?" He would shake his head gloomily, and go on as if communing with his own soul: "Not consciously to mislead, that is the basic human obligation." Then he would look down on a sudden at the little school-girl trotting solemnly along by his side, and resume with a kind of severity: "I don't owe my child money"--he used to revert to this as if it were a sore point--"I don't owe my child worldly position or honors, or houses or lands, but I owe him honesty. I shall never consciously deceive him." And so Sunday by Sunday she heard the Gospel preached at St. Thomas's in the morning, and in the later day the new tidings of science, and a sort of sublimated socialism, preached among the lanes and hills. She heard the story of the making of the world (not according to Genesis), and was invited to observe in "Nature's Workshop," as her father called the hills, how the making and transforming still went on. "In these high places," he would say, with enthusiasm, "you may detect Nature in the very act." Val was shown how busy the little brooks were, and the wide river as well, ever making "sedimentary deposits," still carving out its channel, wearing down the fire-born rock as surely as the chalk cliffs in its "ancient ineradicable inclination to the sea."