They had watched the fingers of love light a candle in the darkness of the late seventies and the early eighties, and ... "The candle went out," Edward Caspar would say. "Candles always do in the Church of England." "Yet the light grows," his companion would answer. "Assuredly," Edward would agree. "Everywhere but in the Churches." Evelyn Moray's disillusionment had begun even before her marriage. For all her innocence she brought a singularly shrewd judgment to bear on the affairs of men. And if as she came to understand the truth, she suffered at first the pangs of betrayed love, she was too brave a spirit not to face the situation in its entirety. The noble words of the Order of Baptism--_manfully to fight under His banner against sin, the world, and the Devil_--applied, she found, to a Church the outstanding characteristic of which was that it never fought at all. When she was bogged in a quagmire of doubt and despair, fearful of the new, more than dissatisfied by the old, Mr. Trupp had come into her life. His sane judgment, his wide experience, and broad philosophy, landed her once more on _terra firma_. In a time before the great Exodus from the Temples of Orthodoxy had assumed the proportions that we know to-day, she had left their gloomy portals to seek elsewhere that simple and direct service of mankind her spirit needed for its fulfilment. Her father's death left her something of an heiress. Forthwith she started a maternity home in a quiet street in Sea-gate for young women of the middle-class who had fallen victims of a Society which failed to protect them, to give them opportunity, to supply their honest needs. The conditions of entry to the home were strict; and Mrs. Trupp never wilfully departed from them. Sometimes, it is true, she was taken in; often she was disappointed; but she persevered with the tenacity that is the inevitable outcome of continuous prayer. She ran her home very quietly; and Mr. Trupp was, of course, her medical officer. But the Church, jealous of all trespassing within what it believed to be its own demesne, heard and objected. "Making sin easy," said Lady Augusta Willcocks, who wore short hair and cultivated the downright manner which she believed to be characteristic of the English aristocracy. She cherished a secret antipathy for "the doctor's wife," as in her more bitter moments she would describe her neighbour. Lady Augusta was indeed of the world of Victoria and Disraeli, opulent, pushing, loud; Mrs. Trupp of an older, finer, more deliberate age. There was between the temper and tradition of the two ladies a gulf no convention could bridge. Lady Augusta felt and resented the fact.