Lacrima had a dim suspicion that some of these less pious theories were due to the perverse Luke, who, as the cloudier July days overcast his evening rambles, had acquired the habit of strolling at night-fall into Mr. Quincunx’s kitchen. Once indeed she was certain she discerned the trail of this plausible heathen in her friend’s words. Mr. Quincunx, with one of his peculiarly goblin-like leers, had intimated--in jest indeed, but with a searching look into her face that it would be no very difficult task to deceive,--in shrewd Panurgian roguery, this clumsy clown. His words at the time had hurt and shocked her; and her reaction from them had led to the spoiling of a pleasant conversation; but they invaded afterwards, more deeply than she would have cared to confess, her hours of dreamy solitude. Her southern imagination, free from both the grossness and the hypocrisy of the Nevilton mind, was much readier to wander upon an antinomian path--at least in its wayward fancies--than it would have been, had circumstances not led her away from her inherited faith. While the sensuality of Gladys left her absolutely untouched, the anarchistic theories of her friend--especially now they had been fortified and directed by the insidious Luke--gave her intelligence many queer and lawless topics of solitary brooding. Her senses, her instincts, were as pure and unsophisticated as ever; but her conscience was besieged and threatened. It was indeed a queer rôle--this, which fate laid upon Mr. Quincunx--the rôle of undermining the reluctance of his own sweetheart to make a loveless marriage--but it was one for which his curious lack of physical passion singularly fitted him. Had Vennie Seldom or Hugh Clavering been aware of the condition of affairs they would have condemned Mr. Quincunx in the most wholesale manner. Clavering would probably have been tempted to apply to him some of the most abusive language in the dictionary. But it is extremely questionable whether this judgment of theirs would have been justified. A more enlightened planetary observer, initiated into the labyrinthine hearts of men, might well have pointed out that Mr. Quincunx’s theories were largely a matter of pure speculation, humorously remote from any contact with reality. He might also have reminded these indignant ones that Mr. Quincunx quite genuinely laboured under the illusion--if it were an illusion--that for his friend to be mistress of the Priory and free of her dependence on the Romers was a thing eminently desirable, and worth the price she paid for it. Such an invisible clairvoyant might even have surmised, what no one in Nevilton who knew of Mr. Romer’s offer would for one second have believed; namely, that he would have given her the same advice had there been no such offer, simply on the general ground of binding her permanently to the place.