He smiled. "I _once_ thought I might find Rome at the end of my wandering." "Ah!" she said, quite calmly, "my father used to say, 'You will all have to come back to Mother Church.'" "I do not mean that I felt like that long," Ethan said, hurriedly, realizing that he was sailing under false colors, "or that I think now as I suppose you do. It's probably little more with me than that 'I was born in the wilds of Christianity, and the briers and thorns still hang about me.'" "You got that from your Uncle John," she said, coldly. "No; it was said the century before he was born." "To me, God is the great fact of life. To be without God is to be without hope in the world." Ethan shaded his lowered eyes with one hand as he answered: "Yes, I've thought that, too." She looked at him reassured. "Ah! I have ceased to be troubled at minor differences of creed; but when we are young, we are less--catholic," she smiled, and then grew grave. "I hope you will never say anything to unsettle the faith of the little girls." "Oh, I shouldn't dream-- But Val has not been confirmed, I understand." "No; I don't believe any longer in pressing these things." "She would have required pressing?" "She has not developed any great concern about spiritual matters. And yet, as a child, she was much occupied about religion. Not as you and Emmie were. With Val it was all the wrong way up." "Wrong way--" Mrs. Gano nodded, reflectively. "Her interest in the Bible seemed founded upon the large opportunity it gave her for the exercise of rank unbelief. I was always hoping to overcome the tendency. But"--she shook her head--"if, as a treat, I allowed her to choose what portion of the Scripture should be read aloud, it was always the Revelation." "Oh, I don't think that so depraved." "Neither did I, till one Sunday, as I got to the words, 'And I, John, saw,' I was arrested by a movement from the child sitting at my feet. I looked down and saw the small face puckered with the concentrated essence of suspicion. 'Who saw it 'sides John?' she demanded. And that, briefly, has been her attitude ever since. I lament it, but I don't talk to her about it any more. The one Christian tenet that I am satisfied Val holds is the doctrine of the Resurrection. Strange--strange! Now, Emmie is like all the rest of the Ganos." Ethan nodded. "Yes, Val is a stranger among us. Poor Val!" Emmie was certainly a vision of innocent loveliness, as she went up to the chancel that Easter morning, to be received into the communion of the faithful. There was something poetic, something not wholly of this world, in her fragile beauty, her rapt and lighted look. Ethan recognized in the sweet face--never so unclouded as to-day--the subtle ecstasy of the devotee. Something in him stirred painfully, regretfully, answering to it with a sense of unwilling sympathy, of kinship that would not be denied. People in the church that day whispered to each other: