When they had left the room Arthur looked inquiringly at Alice.

‘This is very disagreeable,’ he said; ’I really didn’t think the likeness was so marked as all that; I assure you I didn’t.  I must do something to alter it—­I might change the colour of the hair; but no, I can’t do that, the entire scheme of colour depends upon that.  It is a great pity, for it is one of my best things; the features I might alter, and yet it is very hard to do so, without losing the character.  I wonder if I were to make the nose straighter.  Alice, dear, would you mind turning your head this way?’

‘Oh! no, no, no, papa dear!  You aren’t going to put my face upon it!’ And she ran from the room smothered with laughter.

When this little quarrel was over and done, and Olive had ceased to consider herself a disgraced girl, the allusion that had been made to Mass as a means of meeting Captain Hibbert remained like a sting in Alice’s memory.  It surprised her at all sorts of odd moments, and often forced her, under many different impulses of mind, to reconsider the religious problem more passionately and intensely than she had ever done before.  She asked herself if she had ever believed?  Perhaps in very early youth, in a sort of vague, half-hearted way, she had taken for granted the usual traditional ideas of heaven and hell, but even then, she remembered, she used to wonder how it was that time was found for everything else but God.  If He existed, it seemed to her that monks and nuns, or puritans of the sternest type, were alone in the right.  And yet she couldn’t quite feel that they were right.  She had always been intensely conscious of the grotesque contrast between a creed like that of the Christian, and having dancing and French lessons, and going to garden-parties—­yes, and making wreaths and decorations for churches at Christmas-time.  If one only believed, and had but a shilling, surely the only logical way of spending it was to give it to the poor, or a missionary—­and yet nobody seemed to think so.  Priests and bishops did not do so, she herself did not want to do so; still, so long as Alice believed, she was unable to get rid of the idea.  Teachers might say what they pleased, but the creed they taught spoke for itself, and prescribed an impossible ideal—­an unsatisfactory ideal which aspired to no more than saving oneself after all.

Lies and all kinds of subterfuge were strictly against her character.  But it was impossible for her to do or say anything when by so doing she knew she might cause suffering or give pain to anyone, even an enemy; and this defect in her character forced her to live up to what she deemed a lie.  She had longed to tell the truth and thereby be saved the mummery of attending at Mass; but when she realized the consternation, the agony of mind, it would cause the nuns she loved, she held back the word.  But since she had left the convent she had begun to feel that her life must correspond to her ideas and she