sentence which her father spoke as the embodiment
of a thought with which she was herself familiar.

"Well, then, here's a definite thing, an influence most likely, a
characteristic most certainly, and not of your making! One out of how
many influences, characteristics which are part of you but not of your
making! But we can lay our finger on it. Well, it is a pleasant and a
pretty quality--this dream of yours, Sylvia--yes, a very pleasant one to
be born with. But suppose that instead of that dream you had been born
with a vice, an instinct of crime, of sin, would you have been any the
more responsible for it? If you are not responsible for the good thing,
are you responsible for the bad? An awkward question, Sylvia--awkward
enough to teach you to go warily in your judgments."

"Yes," said Sylvia. "I was amongst the fortunate. I don't deny it."

"But that's not all," and as Chayne moved restively, Garratt Skinner
waved an indulgent hand.

"I don't expect you, Captain Chayne, to take an interest in these
problems. For a military man, discipline and the penal code are the
obvious unalterable solutions. But it is possible that I may never see my
daughter again and--I am speaking to her"; and he went back to the old
vexed question.

"It's not only that you are born with qualities, definite
characteristics, definite cravings, for which you are no more responsible
than the man in the moon, and which are part of you. But there's
something else. How much of your character, how much of all your life to
come is decided for you during the first ten or fifteen years of your
life--decided for you, mind, not by you? Upon my soul, I think the whole
of it. You don't agree? Well, it's an open question. I believe that at
the age of fifteen the lines along which you will move are already drawn,
your character formed, your conduct for the future a settled thing."

To that Sylvia gave no assent. But she did not disagree. She only looked
at her father with a questioning and a troubled face. If it were so, she
asked, why had she hated from the first the circle in which her mother
and herself had moved. And the answer--or at all events _an_ answer--came
as she put the question to herself. She had lived amongst her dreams. She
was in doubt.

"Well, hear something of my boyhood, Sylvia!" cried her father, and for
the first time his voice became embittered. "I was brought up by a
respectable father. Yes, respectable," he said, with a snee