eeks are as red as yours now you're blushing. You ought to have
left off that trick by this time. It's well enough in a boy."

Against her will she was drawn to the young man, and her consciousness of
it plucked her back to caution with occasional jerks--quaint alternations
of the familiar and the harshly formal, in the stranger's experience.

"If I have your permission, Lady Charlotte," said he, "the reason why I
mount red a little--if I do it--is, you mention Lord Ormont, and I have
followed his career since I was the youngest of boys."

"Good to begin with the worship of a hero. He can't sham, can't
deceive--not even a woman; and you're old enough to understand the
temptation: they're so silly. All the more, it's a point of honour with a
man of honour to shield her from herself. When it's a girl--"

The young man's eyebrows bent.

"Chapters of stories, if you want to hear them," she resumed; "and I can
vouch some of them true. Lord Ormont was never one of the wolves in a
hood. Whatever you hear of him; you may be sure he laid no trap. He's
just the opposite to the hypocrite; so hypocrites date him. I've heard
them called high-priests of decency. Then we choose to be indecent and
honest, if there's a God to worship. Fear, they're in the habit of
saying--we are to fear God. A man here, a Rev. Hampton-Evey, you'll hear
him harp on 'fear God.' Hypocrites may: honest sinners have no fear. And
see the cause: they don't deceive themselves--that is why. Do you think
we call love what we fear? They love God, or they disbelieve. And if they
believe in Him, they know they can't conceal anything from Him. Honesty
means piety: we can't be one without the other. And here are
people--parsons--who talk of dying as going into the presence of our
Maker, as if He had been all the while outside the world He created.
Those parsons, I told the Rev. Hampton-Evey here, make infidels--they
make a puzzle of their God. I'm for a rational Deity. They preach up a
supernatural eccentric. I don't say all: I've heard good sermons, and met
sound-headed clergymen--not like that gaping Hampton-Evey, when a woman
tells him she thinks for herself. We have him sitting on our pariah. A
free-thinker startles him as a kind of demon; but a female free-thinker
is one of Satan's concubines. He took it upon himself to reproach
me--flung his glove at my feet, because I sent a cheque to a poor man
punished for blasphemy. The man had the right to his opinions,