nt of Calvinism, but intensely earnest and
conscientious; one who looked upon the world as a place of sin and woe
through which we must labour and pass on, a difficult path beset with
rocks and thorns, leading to the unmeasured plains of Heaven. Also he
was an educated man who had taken high degrees at college, and really
learned in his way. While he was a curate, working very hard in a great
seaport town, he had married the daughter of another clergyman of the
city, who died in a sudden fashion as the result of an accident,
leaving the girl an orphan. She was not pure English as her mother had
been a Dane, but on both sides her descent was high, as indeed was that
of Mr. Knight himself.

This union, contracted on the husband's part largely from motives that
might be called charitable, since he had promised his deceased
colleague on his death bed to befriend the daughter, was but moderately
successful. The wife had the characteristics of her race; largeness and
liberality of view, high aspirations for humanity, considerable
intelligence, and a certain tendency towards mysticism of the
Swedenborgian type, qualities that her husband neither shared nor could
appreciate. It was perhaps as well, therefore that she died at the
birth of her only son, Godfrey, three years after her marriage.

Mr. Knight never married again. Matrimony was not a state which
appealed to his somewhat shrunken nature. Although he admitted its
necessity to the human race, of it in his heart he did not approve, nor
would he ever have undertaken it at all had it not been for a sense of
obligation. This attitude, because it made for virtue as he understood
it, he set down to virtue, as we are all apt to do, a sacrifice of the
things of earth and of the flesh to the things of heaven, and of the
spirit. In fact, it was nothing of the sort, but only the outcome of
individual physical and mental conditions. Towards female society,
however hallowed and approved its form, he had no leanings. Also the
child was a difficulty, so great indeed that at times almost he
regretted that a wise Providence had not thought fit to take it
straight to the joys of heaven with its mother, though afterwards, as
the boy's intelligence unfolded, he developed interest in him. This,
however, he was careful to keep in check, lest he should fall into the
sin of inordinate affection, denounced by St. Paul in common with other
errors.

Finally, he found an elderly widow, named Par