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talking to that atheist's daughter. He enjoyed the general
discomfiture to his heart's content, and then devoted himself to
the lady on his other side.
As for Erica her blood was up. Forced to sit still, forced even to
eat at a table where she was an unwelcome guest, her anger got the
mastery of her for the time. She was indignant at the insult to
her father, indignant, too, that her aunt had ever allowed her to
get into such a false position. The very constraint she was forced
to put upon herself made her wrath all the deeper. She was no
angel yet, though Mr. BurneJones might have taken her for a model.
She was a quicktempered little piece of humanity; her passions
burned with Highland intensity, her sense of indignation was strong
and keen, and the atmosphere of her home, the hard struggle against
intolerable bigotry and malicious persecution had from her very
babyhood tended to increase this. She had inherited all her
father's passion for justice and much of his excessive pride, while
her delicate physical frame made her far more sensitive. Moreover,
though since that June morning in the museum she had gained a peace
and happiness of which in the old days she had never dreamed, yet
the entire change had in many ways increased the difficulties of
her life. Such a wrench, such an upheaval as it had involved,
could not but tell upon her immensely. And, besides, she had in
every way for the last three months been living at high pressure.
The grief, the disapproval, the contemptuous pity of her secularist
friends had taxed her strength to the utmost, but she had stood
firm, and had indeed been living on the heights.
Now the months of Charles Osmond's careful preparation were over,
her baptism was over, and a little weary and overdone with all that
she had lived through that summer, she had come down to Greyshot
expecting rest, and behold, fresh vexations had awaited her!
A nice Christian world! A nice type of a clergyman! she thought
to herself, as bitterly as in the old days, and with a touch of
sorrow added. The old lines from Hiawatha, which had been so
often on her lips, now rang in her head:
For his heart was hot within him, Like a living coal his heart
was.
She longed to get up and go, but that would have put her aunt in a
yet more painful position, and might have annoyed Lady Caroline
even more than her presence. She would have given anything to have
fainted after the convenient fashion of the heroines of romance,
but never had she felt so completely strung up, so conscious of
intense vitality. There was nothing for it but endurance. And for

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