lled a friendship of the spirit. Yet, and this was the curious
part of it, they were dissimilar in almost everything that goes to make
up a human being. Even in childhood there was scarcely a subject on
which they thought alike, scarcely a point upon which they would not
argue.

Godfrey was fond of poetry; it bored Isobel. His tendencies were
towards religion though of a very different type from that preached and
practised by his father; hers were anti-religious. In fact she would
have been inclined to endorse the saying of that other schoolgirl who
defined faith as "the art of believing those things which we know to be
untrue," while to him on the other hand they were profoundly true,
though often enough not in the way that they are generally accepted.
Had he possessed any powers of definition at that age, probably he
would have described our accepted beliefs as shadows of the Truth,
distorted and fantastically shaped, like those thrown by changeful,
ragged clouds behind which the eternal sun is shining, shadows that
vary in length and character according to the hour and weather of the
mortal day.

Isobel for her part took little heed of shadows. Her clear, scientific
stamp of mind searched for ascertainable facts, and on these she built
up her philosophy of life and of the death that ends it. Of course all
such contradictions may often be found in a single mind which believes
at one time and rejects at another and sees two, or twenty sides of
everything with a painful and bewildering clearness.

Such a character is apt to end in profound dissatisfaction with the
self from which it cannot be free. Much more then would one have
imagined that these two must have been dissatisfied with each other and
sought the opportunities of escape which were open to them. But it was
not so in the least. They argued and contradicted until they had
nothing more to say, and then lapsed into long periods of weary but
good-natured silence. In a sense each completed each by the addition of
its opposite, as the darkness completes the light, thus making the
round of the perfect day.

As yet this deep affection and remarkable oneness showed no signs of
the end to which obviously it was drifting. That kiss which the girl
had given to the boy was pure sisterly, or one might almost say,
motherly, and indeed this quality inspired their relationship for much
longer than might have been expected. So much was this so that no one
connected with t