cism whose influence on her
character he found himself beginning to fear. But he wished also that she
should be repelled to some extent by the merciless rigidity she would
find at Northampton, and thus, after an oscillation or two come to rest
in the quiet eclecticism of that middle position which he occupied
himself.

The town indeed was at this time a miniature Geneva. There was something
in the temper of its inhabitants that made it especially susceptible to
the wave of Puritanism that was sweeping over England. Lollardy had
flourished among them so far back as the reign of Richard II; when the
mayor, as folks told one another with pride, had plucked a mass-priest by
the vestment on the way to the altar in All Saints' Church, and had made
him give over his mummery till the preacher had finished his sermon.

Dr. Carrington, too, a clean-shaven, blue-eyed, grey-haired man,
churchwarden of Saint Sepulchre's, was a representative of the straitest
views, and desperately in earnest. For him the world ranged itself into
the redeemed and the damned; these two companies were the pivots of life
for him; and every subject of mind or desire was significant only so far
as it bore relations to be immutable decrees of God. But his fierce and
merciless theological insistence was disguised by a real human tenderness
and a marked courtesy of manner; and Isabel found him a kindly and
thoughtful host.

Yet the mechanical strictness of the household, and the overpowering
sense of the weightiness of life that it conveyed, was a revelation to
Isabel. Dr. Carrington at family prayers was a tremendous figure, as he
kneeled upright at the head of the table in the sombre dining-room; and
it seemed to Isabel in her place that the pitiless all-seeing Presence
that kept such terrifying silence as the Doctor cried on Jehovah, was
almost a different God to that whom she knew in the morning parlour at
home, to whom her father prayed with more familiarity but no less
romance, and who answered in the sunshine that lay on the carpet, and the
shadows of boughs that moved across it, and the chirp of the birds under
the eaves. And all day long she thought she noticed the same difference;
at Great Keynes life was made up of many parts, the love of family, the
country doings, the worship of God, the garden, and the company of the
Hall ladies; and the Presence of God interpenetrated all like light or
fragrance; but here life was lived under the glare of Hi