s and hurt you more
as the years roll on! But though life will have its surprises for you,
death perchance will have none; for when the secrets of all hearts are
opened, and all thwarted desires are made known, it may be that the
ordinary selfish man and woman will stand forth as the perfect knight
and faithful friend that God intended them, and you believed them, and
they tried yet failed to be; and you will be satisfied at last when you
see your beloved ones wake up after His likeness, and will smile as you
say to them, "So it is really you after all."

Although Tremaine might be lacking in his duty toward God, he fulfilled
(in the spirit if not in the letter) his duty toward his neighbour; and
Elisabeth was fairly dazzled by his many schemes for making life easier
and happier to the people who dwelt in the darkness of the Black
Country.

It was while he was thus figuring as her ideal hero that Elisabeth went
to stay with Felicia Herbert, near a manufacturing town in Yorkshire.
Felicia had been once or twice to the Willows, and was well acquainted
with the physical and biographical characteristics of the place; and she
cherished a profound admiration both for Miss Farringdon and Christopher
Thornley. Tremaine she had never met--he had been abroad each time that
she had visited Sedgehill--but she disapproved most heartily of his
influence upon Elisabeth, and of his views as set forth by that young
lady. Felicia had been brought up along extremely strict lines, and in a
spirit of comfortable intolerance of all forms of religion not
absolutely identical with her own; consequently, a man with no form of
religion at all was to her a very terrible monster indeed. On the
Sundays of her early youth she had perused a story treating of an
Unbeliever (always spelled with a capital U), and the punishments that
were meted out to the daughter of light who was unequally yoked with
him; and she was imbued with a strong conviction that these same
punishments were destined to fall upon Elisabeth's head, should
Elisabeth incline favourably to the (at present) hypothetical suit of
the master of the Moat House. Thus it happened that when Elisabeth came
to the Herberts', full of girlish admiration for Alan Tremaine, Felicia
did her best to ripen that admiration into love by abusing Alan in and
out of season, and by endeavouring to prove that an attachment to him
would be a soul-destroyer of the most irreparable completeness.

"It is no