Chapter 21

A fortnight later, one hot afternoon, Fan was reading beside the open
window of the dining-room. After dinner Mrs. Churton had given her _The
Pleasures of Hope_, in a slim old octavo volume, to read, and for the
last hour she had been poring over it. Greatly did she admire it, it was
so fine, so grand; but all that thunderous roll of rhetoric--the
whiskered Pandoors and the fierce Hussars, and Freedom's shriek when
Kosciusko fell, and flights of bickering comets through illimitable
space--a kind of celestial fireworks on a stupendous scale--and all the
realms of ether wrapped in flames--all this had produced a slight
headache, a confusion or giddiness, like that which is experienced by a
person looking down over a precipice, or when carried too high in a
swing.

Constance came down from her room with her hat on and a book in her hand.

"Are you going for a walk, Constance?" asked her mother, who was also
sitting by the open window.

"Yes, only to the woods, where I can sit and read in the shade."

Mrs. Churton glanced suspiciously at the book in her daughter's hand--a
thick volume bound in dark-green cloth. There was nothing in its
appearance to alarm anyone, but she did not like these thick green-bound
books that were never by any chance found lying about for one to see what
was in them. However, she only answered:

"Then I wish you would persuade Fan to go with you. She is looking pale,
it strikes me."

"I shall be glad if Fan will go," she answered, a slight accent of
surprise in her tone.

Fan ran up to get her hat and sunshade, and when she returned to them her
pallor and headache had well-nigh vanished at the prospect of an
afternoon spent in the shady woodland paradise. Mrs. Churton, with a
prayer in her heart, watched them going away together--two lovely girls;
it made her anxious when her eyes rested on the portly green volume her
daughter carried, but it struck her as a good augury when she noticed
that the younger girl in her white dress had _The Pleasures of Hope_
in her hand.

For now a new thought, a hope that was very beautiful, had come into Mrs.
Churton's heart. All her life long she had had the delusion that
"spiritual pride" was her besetting sin; and against this imaginary enemy
she was perpetually fighting. And yet if some shining being had come down
to tell her that her prayers for others had been heard, that all the
worthless and vicious people she wished to carry to heaven with her would
be saved, and all of them, even the meanest, set above her in that place
where the first is last and the last first, joy at such tidings would
have slain her. She had as little spiritual pride as a ladybird or an