oon
understood his unexpressed feeling and thrilled with religious fear.
Although--or indeed because--she loved her husband so much she was
tortured by his lack of faith. And now she was alarmed at the thought of
the effect his influence might have upon Catherine. She was roused to an
intense activity of the soul. She said nothing to her husband of her
fear and horror. He said nothing to her of his secret determination that
his only child should grow up in his own faithless faith. But a silent
and determined battle began to rage between them for the possession of
Catherine's soul. And, at last, this battle turned the former love of
the parents into a sort of uneasy hatred. The child did not fully
comprehend what was going on around her, but she dimly felt it. And it
influenced her whole nature.

Her mother, who was given over to religious forms, who was ritualistic
and sentimental as well as really devout and fervent, at first gained
the ascendancy over Catherine. Holy but narrow-minded, she compressed
the girl's naturally expansive temperament, and taught her something of
the hideous and brooding melancholy of the bigot and the fanatic. Then
the father, quick-sighted, and roused to an almost angry activity by his
appreciation of Catherine's danger, threw himself into the combat, and
endeavoured to imbue the girl with his own comprehension of life's
meaning, exaggerating all his theories in the endeavour to make them
seem sufficiently vital and impressive. Catherine lived in the centre of
this battle, which became continually more fierce, until she was
eighteen. Then she fell in love with Mark Sirrett, married him, and left
her parents alone with their mutual hostility, now complicated by a sort
of paralysis of surprise and sense of mutual failure. They had forgotten
that their child's future might hold a lover, a husband. Now they found
themselves in the rather absurd position of enemies who have quarrelled
over a shadow which suddenly vanishes away. They had lost their love for
each other, they had lost Catherine. But her soul, though it was given
to Mark Sirrett, had not lost their impress. Both the Puritanism of her
mother and the paganism of her father were destined to play their parts
in the guidance of her strange and terrible destiny.

Mark Sirrett, when he married Catherine, was twenty-five, dark,
handsome, warm-hearted and rich. It seemed that he had an exceptionally
sweet and attractive nature. He had been a