he was
proud of her youngest brother, of his unlikeness to the rest, even of
the aloofness and fits of dreaming which she no more than the others
understood, but which she was sufficiently in advance of them to revere
instead of scorning. She was more like him than she knew, though in her
ambition had taken harder and more personal form.

With the spring Annie became unbearable. Archelaus had suddenly gone off
again, after his fashion, this time to the goldfields of California, and
Annie, who felt his departure bitterly, chose to blame Ishmael for it.
Christmas had been for her the occasion to revive all her religious
frenzies, and the house rang with her cracked-voiced hymns till Ishmael
felt he could have smothered her with her own feather-bed. Her lust for
religion, however, was taking a new direction--it was towards the Parson
and his church instead of the conventicle of Mr. Tonkin. Quite what had
brought about this change was hard to say--probably chiefly the
infatuation of Tonkin for Vassie, a circumstance Annie took as an insult
to herself.

"A man on in years like him, oldern' I be myself, and a minister before
the Lard, ought to have other things to think on than wantoning with his
thoughts after a maid young enough to be his daughter! Where's his
religion, I should like to knaw?" This was Annie's own explanation, and
even she realised that against Boase no charge of thinking about women
could be brought--that quality of priesthood even her ignorance
unconsciously admitted. She approached Boase on the subject of his creed
and met with scant encouragement, which made her the more earnest. If
the Parson had been anxious to receive her into the path he trod, she
would have lagged; as it was, his brusqueness awaked a sensation of
pleasure in her--there was no male to snub and bully her now that
Archelaus had gone away. She set up to herself the image of Boase that
some more educated women make of their doctor--a bully who had to be
placated, who would scold her if she transgressed his ideas. She took to
going to church every Sunday evening and sat in the Manor pew, every
jet bead trembling on her bonnet as she kept her mind strained to
attention--always a difficult task with her for any length of time.

One wet afternoon Vassie found she was not in the house, though when she
had slipped out no one could say. Ishmael, alarmed--for nothing could
have been more unlike Annie's habits--was about to set out in search o