Now, it so happened that Lillie’s maternal grandfather, a nice, pious old gentleman, had taken the occasion to make her the edifying and suggestive present of a large, elegantly bound family Bible.

The binding was unexceptionable; and Lillie assigned it a proper place of honor among her wedding-gear.  Alas! she had not looked into it, nor seen what dangers to her power were lodged between its leaves.

But John, who was curious in the matter of books, sat quietly down in a corner to examine it; and on the middle page, under the head “Family Record,” he found, in a large, bold hand, the date of the birth of “Lillie Ellis” in figures of the most uncompromising plainness; and thence, with one flash of his well-trained arithmetical sense, came the perception that, instead of being twenty years old, she was in fact twenty-seven,—­and that of course she had lied to him.

[Illustration:  “He found the date of the birth of ‘Lillie Ellis.’”]

It was a horrid and a hard word for an American young man to have suggested in relation to his wife.  If we may believe the French romancer, a Frenchman would simply have smiled in amusement on detecting this petty feminine ruse of his beloved.  But American men are in the habit of expecting the truth from respectable women as a matter of course; and the want of it in the smallest degree strikes them as shocking.  Only an Englishman or an American can understand the dreadful pain of that discovery to John.

The Anglo-Saxon race have, so to speak, a worship of truth; and they hate and abhor lying with an energy which leaves no power of tolerance.

The Celtic races have a certain sympathy with deception.  They have a certain appreciation of the value of lying as a fine art, which has never been more skilfully shown than in the passage from De Balzac we have quoted.  The woman who is described by him as lying so sweetly and skilfully is represented as one of those women “qui ont je ne sais quoi de saint et de sacre, qui inspirent tant de respect que l’amour,”—­“a woman who has an indescribable something of holiness and purity which inspires respect as well as love.”  It was no detraction from the character of Jesus, according to the estimate of Renan, to represent him as consenting to a benevolent fraud, and seeming to work miracles when he did not work them, by way of increasing his good influence over the multitude.

But John was the offspring of a generation of men for hundreds of years, who would any of them have gone to the stake rather than have told the smallest untruth; and for him who had been watched and guarded and catechised against this sin from his cradle, till he was as true and pure as a crystal rock, to have his faith shattered in the woman he loved, was a terrible thing.

As he read the fatal figures, a mist swam before his eyes,—­a sort of faintness came over him.  It seemed for a moment as if his very life was sinking down through his boots into the carpet.  He threw down the book hastily, and, turning, stepped through an open window into the garden, and walked quickly off.