vout one, aiding his wife's Church by every means in his power, giving
large sums to Catholic charities, and working, with almost fiery zeal,
for the spread of Catholicism in England.

Unfortunately, his new faith was founded only on love for a human being,
and when Lady Rens, who was intensely passionate and impulsive, suddenly
threw all her principles to the winds, and ran away with a Hungarian
musician, who had made a furor one season in London by his magnificent
violin-playing, her husband, stricken in his soul, and also wounded
almost to the death in his pride, abandoned abruptly the religion of the
woman who had converted and betrayed him.

Domini was nineteen, and had recently been presented at Court when the
scandal of her mother's escapade shook the town, and changed her father
in a day from one of the happiest to one of the most cynical, embittered
and despairing of men. She, who had been brought up by both her parents
as a Catholic, who had from her earliest years been earnestly educated
in the beauties of religion, was now exposed to the almost frantic
persuasions of a father who, hating all that he had formerly loved,
abandoning all that, influenced by his faithless wife, he had formerly
clung to, wished to carry his daughter with him into his new and most
miserable way of life. But Domini, who, with much of her mother's dark
beauty, had inherited much of her quick vehemence and passion, was also
gifted with brains, and with a certain largeness of temperament and
clearness of insight which Lady Rens lacked. Even when she was still
quivering under the shock and shame of her mother's guilt and her own
solitude, Domini was unable to share her father's intensely egoistic
view of the religion of the culprit. She could not be persuaded that the
faith in which she had been brought up was proved to be a sham because
one of its professors, whom she had above all others loved and trusted,
had broken away from its teachings and defied her own belief. She would
not secede with her father; but remained in the Church of the mother she
was never to see again, and this in spite of extraordinary and dogged
efforts on the part of Lord Rens to pervert her to his own Atheism. His
mind had been so warped by the agony of his heart that he had come to
feel as if by tearing his only child from the religion he had been led
to by the greatest sinner he had known, he would be, in some degree at
least, purifying his life tarnished by