ld waste no time in accusing others. Very soon she
dismissed him from her mind. In all the blank hopelessness of her
fall from hope she put aside self-pity, and tasked herself to face
the worst. To Emilia and Nancy she had spoken lightly, as if
scarcely alive to her dreadful position, still less alive to her sin.
They had misunderstood her: but in truth she had spoken so on the
instinct of self-defence. Real defence she had none.

She knew she had none. And let it be said here that she saw no
comfortable hope in religion. She had listened to a plenty of
doctrine from her early childhood: but somehow the mysteries of God
had seldom occupied her thoughts, never as bearing directly on the
questions of daily life. If asked, for example, "did she believe in
the Trinity?" or "did she believe in justification by faith?" she
would have answered "yes," without hesitating for a moment. But in
fact these high teachings lay outside her private religion, which
amounted to this--"God is all-seeing and omnipotent. To please Him I
must be good; and being good gives me pleasure in turn, for I feel
that His eye is upon me and He approves. He is terribly stern: but
all-merciful too. If, having done wrong, I go to Him contritely, and
repent, He will give me a chance to amend my ways, and if I honestly
strive to amend them, He will forgive." In short--and perhaps
because the word "Father" helped to mislead--she had made for herself
an image of God by exalting and magnifying all that she saw best in
her parents. And this view of Him her parents had confirmed
insensibly, in a thousand trifles, by laying constant daily stress
upon good conduct, and by dictating it and judging her lapses with an
air of calm authority, which took for granted that what pleased them
was exactly what would please God.

So now, having done that which her mother and father could not
forgive, at first she hardly dared to hope that God could by any
means forgive it. In the warm sunlight of loving she had seen for a
while that her father and mother were not always wise; nay, long
beforehand in her discontent she had been groping towards this
discovery. But now that the sunshine had proved a cruel cheat, she
ran back in dismay upon the old guide-posts, and they pointed to a
hell indeed.

She had been wicked. She craved to be good. She remembered Mary
Magdalene, whom Christ had forgiven, and caught at a hope for
herself. But why had Christ forgiven M