Fancy, sister of a beloved brother serving in a battleship, fell a prey to more intimate and poignant considerations. As the child of a delicate mother who had died in giving her birth, pre-natal influence, perhaps, had endowed her with sensibilities common to all women who are physically weaker than they should be, with minds and imaginations more active than their bodies. From her tenderest years Fancy had indulged in meditations concerning angels. Her father habitually spoke of his wife as an angel hovering close to one whom she had never held in her arms. Fancy believed him absolutely. Darkness had no terrors for the child, when she went to bed, because, in addition to her mother, the four evangelists guarded her cot. She was quite positive that she had seen her mother, clothed in shining tissues, with wings like a dove. Matthew, Mark, Luke and John became personal friends with whom the mite affirmed solemnly that she talked and played. Her father, a dreamer rather than a doer, encouraged these fancies, which justified his selection of her Christian name in obstinate defiance of the wishes of his family. The first effect of the war upon Fancy, apart from her sisterly anxieties, was a tightening of the bond between master and maid. Mr. Hamlin held strong democratic opinions, a source of friction between himself and Sir Geoffrey Pomfret. He desired ardently a more equable distribution, not merely of wealth, but of health and intelligence. He believed absolutely in the equality of souls before God, and he recognised with ever-increasing satisfaction the potentialities of bodies and minds, if taken in hand early in life. His disabilities as a teacher shewed themselves in a too direct manner of speech, an abruptness caused by an excess rather than a lack of sympathy and perception. As Man and Priest, he shunned those easy by-paths beloved by many of us when we have disagreeable duties to perform. He marched straight to his objectives, regardless of objections.