rotestant?"

"Protestant. Mamma would not allow the Sisters to talk to me about
religion. I always drove to the English Church on Sundays."

"Oh, very well. Do as you please. There are plenty of churches near us.
But you need not bring more clergy than you can help to the house," said
Brooke, with a peculiar smile. "I am not very fond of the Blacks. I am
more of a Red myself, you know."

"A Red?" Lesley asked, helplessly.

"A Red Republican--Radical--Socialist--anything you like," said Brooke,
laughing outright. "You didn't read the papers in your convent, I
suppose. You had better begin to study them straight away. It will be a
pleasant change from the Lives of the Saints. And now, if we have
finished all that we have to say--I am rather busy, and----"

"Oh, I beg your pardon: I will go," said Lesley, rising at once. "I had
no wish to intrude upon you," she added, with an attempt to be dignified
and womanly, which she felt to be a miserable failure. Her father simply
nodded in reply, took up his pen, and allowed her to leave the room.

But when she had gone, he put the pen down and sat back in his chair,
musing. Lesley had surprised him a little. She had more force and fire
in her composition than he had expected to find. She was, as he had
said, very like her mother in face and figure; and the minute
differences of line and contour that showed Lesley to be strong where
Lady Alice had been weak, original where Lady Alice had been most
conventional, intellectual where Lady Alice had been only intelligent,
were not perceptible at first sight even to a practised observer of men
and women like Caspar Brooke. But the flash of her brown eyes, so like
his own, and an occasional intonation in her voice, had told him
something. She was in arms against him, so much he felt; and she had
more individuality than her mother, in spite of her ignorance. It was a
pity that her education had been so much neglected! Manlike, Caspar
Brooke took literally every word that she had uttered; and reproached
himself for having allowed his foolish, frivolous wife to bring up his
daughter in a place where she had been taught nothing but embroidery and
dancing.

"It is a pity," he reflected; "but we cannot alter the matter now. The
poor girl will feel herself sadly out of place in this house, I fear;
but perhaps it won't do her any harm. She may be a better woman all her
life--the idle, selfish, self-indulgent life that she is bound by all