Psalm thrilled her as with the sound of a trumpet; and she was completely carried away by the glorious imagery of the Book of Isaiah, even when she did not in the least understand its meaning. But her favourite book was the Book of Ruth; for was not Ruth's devotion to Naomi the exact counterpart of hers to Cousin Anne? And she used to make up long stories in her own mind about how Cousin Anne should, by some means, lose all her friends and all her money, and be driven out of Sedgehill and away from the Osierfield Works; and then how Elisabeth would say, "Entreat me not to leave thee," and would follow Cousin Anne to the ends of the earth.

People sometimes smile at the adoration of a young girl for a woman, and there is no doubt but that the feeling savours slightly of school-days and bread-and-butter; but there is also no doubt that a girl who has once felt it has learned what real love is, and that is no small item in the lesson-book of life.

But Elisabeth had her comfortable friendship as well as her romantic attachment; and the partner in that friendship was Christopher Thornley, the nephew of Richard Smallwood.

In the days of his youth, when his father was still manager of the Osierfield Works, Richard had a very pretty sister; but as Emily Smallwood was pretty, so was she also vain, and the strict atmosphere of her home life did not recommend itself to her taste. After many quarrels with her stern old father (her mother having died when she was a baby), Emily left home, and took a situation in London as governess, in the house of some wealthy people with no pretensions to religion. For this her father never forgave her; he called it "consorting with children of Belial." In time she wrote to tell Richard that she was going to be married, and that she wished to cut off entirely all communication with her old home. After that, Richard lost sight of her for many years; but some time after his father's death he received a letter from Emily, begging him to come to her at once, as she was dying. He complied with her request, and found his once beautiful sister in great poverty in a London lodging-house. She told him that she had endured great sorrow, having lost her husband and her five eldest children. Her husband had never been unkind to her, she said, but he was one of the men who lack the power either to make or to keep money; and when he found he was foredoomed to failure in everything to which he turned his hand, he had not the spirit to continue the fight against Fate, but turned his face to the wall and died. She had still one child left, a fair-haired boy of about two years old, called Christopher; to her brother's care she confided this boy, and then she also turned her face to the wall and died.

This happened a year or so before the Miss Farringdons adopted Elisabeth; so that when that young lady appeared upon the scene, and subsequently grew up sufficiently to require a playfellow, she found Christopher Thornley ready to hand. He lived with his bachelor uncle in a square red house on the east side of Sedgehill High Street, exactly opposite to the Farringdons' lodge. It was one of those big, bald houses with unblinking windows, that stare at you as if they had not any eyebrows or eyelashes; and there was not even a strip of greenery between it and the High Street. So to prevent the passers-by from looking in and the occupants from looking out, the lower parts of the front windows were covered with a sort of black crape mask, which put even the sunbeams into half-mourning.

Unlike Elisabeth, Christopher had a passion for righteousness and for honour, but no power of artistic perception. His standard was whether things were right or wrong, honourable or dishonourable; hers was whether they were beautiful or ugly, pleasant or unpleasant. Consequently the two moved along parallel lines; and she moved a great deal more quickly than he did. Christopher had deep convictions, but was very shy of expressing them; Elisabeth's convictions were not particularly deep, but such as they were, all the world was welcome to them as far as she was concerned.

As the children grew older, one thing used much to puzzle and perplex Christopher. Elisabeth did not seem to care about being good nearly as much as he cared: he was always trying to do right, and she only tried when she thought about it; nevertheless, when she did give her attention to the matter, she had much more comforting and beautiful thoughts than he had, which appeared rather hard. He was not yet old enough to know that this difference between them arose from no unequal division of divine favour, but was simply and solely a question of temperament. But though he did not understand, he did not complain; for he had been brought up under the shadow of the Osierfield Works, and in the fear and love of the Farringdons; and Elisabeth, whatever her shortcomings, was a princess of the blood.

Christopher was a day-boy at the Grammar School at Silverhampton, a fine old town some three miles to the north of Sedgehill; and there and back he walked every day, wet or fine, and there he learned to be a scholar and a gentleman, and sundry other important things.

"Do you hear that noise?" said Elisabeth, one afternoon in the holidays, when she was twelve and Christopher fifteen; "that's Mrs. Bateson's pig being killed."

"Hear it?—rather," replied Christopher, standing still in the wood to listen.

"Let's go and see it," Elisabeth suggested.

Christopher looked shocked. "Well, you are a horrid girl! Nothing would induce me to go, or to let you go either; but I'm surprised at your being so horrid as to wish for such a thing."

"It isn't really horridness," Elisabeth explained meekly; "it is interest. I'm so frightfully interested in things; and I want to see everything, just to know what it looks like."

"Well, I call it horrid. And, what's more, if you saw it, it would make you feel ill."

"No; it wouldn't."

"Then it ought to," said Christopher, who, with true masculine dulness of perception, confounded weakness of nerve with tenderness of heart.

Elisabeth sighed. "Nothing makes me feel ill," she replied apologetically; "not even an accident or an after-meeting."

Christopher could not help indulging in a certain amount of envious admiration for an organism that could pass unmoved through such physical and spiritual crises as these; but he was not going to let Elisabeth see that he admired her. He considered it "unmanly" to admire girls.

"Well, you are a rum little cove!" he said.

"Of course, I don't want to go if you think it would be horrid of me; but I thought we might pretend it was the execution of Mary Queen of Scots, and find it most awfully exciting."

"How you do go on about Mary Queen of Scots! Not long ago you were always bothering about heathen goddesses, and now you have no thought for anything but Mary."

"Oh! but I'm still immensely interested in goddesses, Chris; and I do wish, when you are doing Latin and Greek at school, you'd find out what colour Pallas Athene's hair was. Couldn't you?"

"No; I couldn't."

"But you might ask one of the masters. They'd be sure to know."

Christopher laughed the laugh of the scornful. "I say, you are a duffer to suppose that clever men like schoolmasters bother their heads about such rot as the colour of a woman's hair."

"Of course, I know they wouldn't about a woman's," Elisabeth hastened to justify herself; "but I thought perhaps they might about a goddess's."

"It is the same thing. You've no idea what tremendously clever chaps schoolmasters are—much too clever to take any interest in girls' and women's concerns. Besides, they are too old for that, too—they are generally quite