the child,
that she was thinking of leaving them, had given him a deeper throb of
emotion than anything he had before known, or was for many years to
know.

But the time for the eager and romantic association with other people,
which was to play so large a part in Hugh's life, was not yet come.
People had to be taken as they came, and their value depended entirely
upon their kindness or unkindness. There was no sense of gratitude as
yet, or desire to win affection. If they were kind, they were
unthinkingly and instinctively liked. If they thwarted or interfered
with the child's little theory of existence, his chosen amusements, his
hours of leisure, his loved pursuits, they were simply obstacles round
which his tiny stream of life must find its way as it best could.

There was indeed one other chief delight for the child: the ordered
services of the Church hard by the house. He loved with all his heart
the fallen day, the pillared vault, the high dusty cornices, the
venerable scent; and the services, with their music solemn and sweet,
the postures of the ministers, the faces, clothes, and habits of the
congregation--all was a delightful field of pleasing experience. Yet
religion was a wholly unreal thing to the child. He learnt his Bible
lessons and psalms; he knew the liturgy by heart; but the religious
idea, the thought of God, the Christian life of effort, were all things
that he merely accepted as so many facts that were taught him, but
without the least interest in them, or even the shadowiest attempt to
apply them to his own life. It seemed strange to Hugh when, in years
long after, religion came to have so deep a meaning to him, that it
should have been so entirely a blank to him in the early days. God was
no more to him than a far-off monarch; a mighty and shadowy person,
very remote and powerful, but the circle of whose influence never
touched his own. And yet one of the deepest desires of his father's
mind had been to bring a sense of religion home to his children. Hugh
used to wonder how he had missed it; but the practical application of
religion, to which the Bible lessons had led up, had been to the child
a mere relief from the tension of thought, because at last he had
escaped from the material teaching about which he might be questioned,
and which he would be expected to remember.

Personal relations, then, had scarcely existed for Hugh as a child.
Older and bigger people, armed with a vague