avy as he
looked at her, heavy with a horror far more great than any that had
overcome him as he examined the bestial company around. And when he came
away, and long afterwards, Catherine Sirrett's face remained in his
memory as the most horrible face in all that silent, watchful crowd of
beings who had wrought violence upon the earth. For it was dressed in
deceit. The other faces were naked. So he thought. He did not know
Catherine Sirrett's story, though he remembered that a woman of her name
had been hanged in England some years before, when he was in India, and
that she had gained many sympathisers by her bearing and roused some
newspaper discussion by her fate.

This is her story, the inner story which the world never knew.

* * * * *

Catherine Sirrett's mother was an intensely, even a morbidly, religious
woman. Her father was an atheist and an aesthete. Yet her parents were
fond of each other at first and made common cause in spoiling their only
child. Sometimes the mother would whisper in the little girl's ear that
she must pray for poor father who was blind to the true light and deaf
to the beautiful voice. Sometimes the father would tell her that if she
would worship she must worship genius, the poet, the painter, the
musician; that if she would pray she must pray to Nature, the sea, the
sunset and the spring-time. But as a rule these two loving antagonists
thought it was enough for their baby, their treasure, to develop
quietly, steadily, in an atmosphere of adoration, in which arose no mist
of theories, no war of words. Till she was ten years old Catherine was
untroubled. At that age a parental contest began to rage--at first
furtively,--about her. With the years her mother's morbidity waxed, her
father's restraint waned. The one became more intensely and frantically
devout, the other more frankly pagan. And now, as the child grew, and
her mind and heart stood up to meet life and girlhood, each of her
parents began to feel towards her the desire of sole possession. She had
been brought up a Christian. The father had permitted that. So long as
she was an ignorant infant he had felt no anxiety to attach her to his
theories. But when he saw the intelligence growing in her eyes, the dawn
of her soul deepening, there stirred within him a strong desire that she
should face existence as he faced it, free from trammels of
superstition. The mother, with the quick intuition of woman, s