'So I thought. But the injustice was done.'

'And you disinherited?'

'Yes.'

'Oh, papa! Just because you followed your own conscience!'

'Just because I held to the traditions of the family. We had _always_
been Independents--fought with Cromwell and suffered under the Stuarts.
I was not going to turn my back on a glorious record like that for any
possible advantages of place and favour.'

'What advantages, papa? I do not understand. You spoke of that before.'

'Yes,' said the colonel a little bitterly, 'in that particular my
stepmother was right. You little know the social disabilities under
which those lie in England who do not belong to the Established Church.
For policy, nobody should be a Dissenter.'

'Dissenter?' echoed Esther, the word awaking a long train of old
associations; and for a moment her thoughts wandered back to them.

'Yes,' the colonel went on; 'my father bade me follow him; but with
more than equal right I called on him to follow a long line of
ancestors. Rather hundreds than one!'

'Papa, in such a matter surely conscience is the only thing to follow,'
said Esther softly. 'You do not think a man ought to be either
Independent or Church of England, just because his fathers have set him
the example?'

'You do not think example and inheritance are anything?' said the
colonel.

'I think they are everything, for the right;--most precious!--but they
cannot decide the right. _That_ a man must do for himself, must he not?'

'Republican doctrine!' said the colonel bitterly. 'I suppose, after I
am gone, you will become a Church of England woman, just to prove to
yourself and others that you are not influenced by me!'

'Papa,' said Esther, half laughing, 'I do not think that is at all
likely; and I am sure you do not. And so that was the reason you came
away?'

'I could not stay there,' said the colonel, 'and see my young brother
in my place, and his mother ruling where your mother should by right
have ruled. They did not love me either,--why should they?--and I felt
more a stranger there than anywhere else. So I took the little property
that came to me from my mother, to which my father in his will had made
a small addition, and left England and home for ever.'

There was a pause of some length.

'Who is left there now, of the family?' Esther asked.

'I have not heard.'

'Do they never write to you?'

'Never.'

'Nor you to them, papa?'

'No. Since I came away there has been no