It was always the same.  It started with a look through his glasses, leveled at each member of his household in turn, as if he desired to satisfy himself as to the expression of their faces while at the same time he defied them to protest.  For the rest, his rule was that of his father, the schoolmaster, before him.  First, a chapter from the Bible, the Old Testament in the morning, the New Testament in the evening, working straight through from Genesis to Revelation (omitting Leviticus as somewhat unsuitable for family reading).  Then prayers proper, beginning with what his daughter Gwendolen, seventeen years ago, had called “fancy prayers,” otherwise prayers not lifted from the Liturgy, but compiled and composed in accordance with the freer Evangelical taste in prayers.  Then (for both Mr. Cartaret and the schoolmaster, his father, held that the Church must not be ignored) there followed last Sunday’s Collect, the Collect for Grace, the Benediction, and the Lord’s Prayer.

Now, as his rule would have it, that evening of the fifth of December brought him to the Eighth chapter of St. John, in the one concerning the woman taken in adultery, which was the very last chapter which Mr. Cartaret that evening could have desired to read.  He had always considered that to some minds it might be open to misinterpretation as a defense of laxity.

“‘Woman, where are those thine accusers? hath no man condemned thee?’

“She said, ‘No man, Lord.’  And Jesus said unto her, ’Neither do I condemn thee.’”

Mr. Cartaret lowered his voice and his eyes as he read, for he felt Gwendolen’s eyes upon him.

But he recovered himself on the final charge.

“‘Go’”—­now he came to think of it, that was what he had said to Essy—­“‘and sin no more.’”

(After all, he was supported.)

Casting another and more decidedly uneasy glance at his family, he knelt down.  He felt better when they were all kneeling, for now he had their backs toward him instead of their faces.

He then prayed.  On behalf of himself and Essy and his family he prayed to a God who (so he assumed his Godhead) was ever more ready to hear than they to pray, a God whom he congratulated on His ability to perform for them far more than they either desired or deserved; he thanked him for having mercifully preserved them to the close of another blessed day (as in the morning he would thank him for having spared them to see the light of another blessed day); he besought him to pardon anything which that day they had done amiss; to deliver them from disobedience and self-will, from pride and waywardness (he had inserted this clause ten years ago for Gwendolen’s benefit) as well as from the sins that did most easily beset them, for the temptations to which they were especially prone.  This clause covered all the things he couldn’t mention.  It covered his wife, Robina’s case; it covered Essy’s; he had dragged Alice’s case as it were from under it; he had a secret fear that one day it might cover Gwendolen’s.