d it. They are strangers to the intensity of religious
passion, and to the swift instinct by which the heart of a child
surrenders to absolute sincerity. This was what the North children
felt in their father--a devotion that was grave, stern, almost fierce
in its single-hearted attachment to them. He was theirs altogether. He
would not let them dance or play cards. The theatre and even the
circus were tabooed to them. Novel-reading was discouraged and no
books were admitted to the house which had not passed under his
censorship. All this seemed strange to them; they could not comprehend
it; at times they talked together about the hardship of it--the two
older ones--and made little plots to relax or circumvent the paternal
rule. But in their hearts they accepted it, because they knew their
father loved them better than any one else in the world, and they
trusted him because they felt that he was a true man and a good man.

You see they were not "children in fiction"; they were real
children--and beautiful, high-spirited children too. Esther was easily
the "fairest of the village maids," and the head of her class in the
high-school; Daniel, a leader in games among the boys of his age; even
eight-year-old Ruth with her fly-away red hair and her wide brown eyes
had her devoted admirers among the younger lads. It was evident to the
Rev. Nathaniel North that his children were destined to have the
perilous gift of popularity, and with all his natural pride in them
he was tormented with anxiety on their account. How to protect them
from temptation, how to shield them from the vain allurements of
wealth and folly and fashion, how to surround them with an atmosphere
altogether serious and devout and pure, how to keep them out of reach
of the evil that is in the world--that was the tremendous problem upon
which his mind and his heart laboured day and night.

Of course he admitted, or rather he positively affirmed, according to
orthodox doctrine, that there was Original Sin in them. Under every
human exterior, however fair, he postulated a heart "deceitful above
all things and desperately wicked." This he regarded as a well-known
axiom of theology, but it had no bearing at all upon the fact of
experience that none of his children had ever lied to him, and that he
would have been amazed out of measure if one of them should ever do a
mean or a cruel thing. Yet he believed, all the same, that the mass of
depravity must be there, in t