Holding old and wholesome views on certain questions of honour, though he certainly was no person to be compared with the Saviour of the World, Mr. Timothy Shelley concurred in the sentiments of Fern House on this affair, and told his son so in terms none too daintily worded. 'The Fiery Hun' blushed to think he had a son capable of sapping the faith and principles of a young lady, to whose familiar confidence he had been admitted under conditions of which no gentleman, old or young, was unmindful. To poor Mrs. Shelley, the case was even worse. Regarding the point of honour with her husband's eyes, she thought also of the monstrous wickedness of her first-born child, who, throwing from him the truths of the Christian religion, had covered them with ridicule. In alarm, she thought of her girls. If Bysshe could act thus wickedly to his cousin Harriett, what was there to withhold him from acting in like manner to his sister Elizabeth? He and she were so closely attached to one another, that it was their practice to read and walk and write poetry together. During the whole of his single term of residence at Oxford, there had been letters passing between them. Had he already inspired the dear girl with sceptical sentiment? Instead of submitting to her father and mother, as Harriett Grove had done, the evil counsel he was giving her, had Elizabeth taken his impious words to heart? Was she pondering them secretly, and brooding over them, in doubt whether she should reject them as false, or hold to them as true? Or had she embraced them no less impetuously and strongly than furtively? Was she already a disbeliever?--an infidel? Then the terrified mother thought of her younger girls,--Mary, and Hellen, and Margaret. If he could tamper with the religious tenets of so young a girl as Elizabeth, still only sixteen years old, what was there in the tenderness of their infantile years to render Bysshe more heedful for the spiritual health and tranquillity of Elizabeth's younger sisters?