ch was
the fetish of her childish worship. Her broken incessant baby-talk, and
the ringing kisses with which she atoned to the baa-lamb for each
successive outrage, made a running accompaniment to the moved undertones
of the parents.

'Don't ask me, Robert, don't ask me! Do you want me to come and sit
thinking of last year's Easter Eve?'

'Heaven knows I was miserable enough last Easter Eve,' he said slowly.

'And now,' she exclaimed, looking at him with a sudden agitation of
every feature, 'now you are not miserable? You are quite confident and
sure? You are going to devote your life to attacking the few remnants of
faith that still remain in the world?'

Never in her married life had she spoken to him with this accent of
bitterness and hostility. He started and withdrew his hand, and there
was a silence.

'I held once a wife in my arms,' he said presently with a voice hardly
audible, 'who said to me that she would never persecute her husband. But
what is persecution if it is not the determination not to understand?'

She buried her face in her hands. 'I could not understand,' she said
sombrely.

'And rather than try,' he insisted, 'you will go on believing that I am
a man without faith, seeking only to destroy.'

'I know you think you have faith,' she answered, 'but how can it seem
faith to me? "He that will not confess Me before men, him will I also
deny before My Father which is in heaven." Your unbelief seems to me
more dangerous than these horrible things which shock you. For you can
make it attractive, you can make it loved, as you once made the faith
of Christ loved.'

He was silent. She raised her face presently, whereon were the traces of
some of those quiet difficult tears which were characteristic of her,
and went softly out of the room.

He stood a while leaning against the mantelpiece, deaf to little Mary's
clamour, and to her occasional clutches at his knees, as she tried to
raise herself on her tiny tottering feet. A sense as though of some
fresh disaster was upon him. His heart was sinking, sinking within him.
And yet none knew better than he that there was nothing fresh. It was
merely that the scene had recalled to him anew some of those unpalatable
truths which the optimist is always much too ready to forget.

Heredity, the moulding force of circumstance, the iron hold of the past
upon the present--a man like Elsmere realises the working of these
things in other men's lives with a singul