“Eunominus, the heretic, boasted that he knew the nature of God; whereupon St. Basil instantly puzzled him with twenty-one questions about the body of the ant!”

Estelle also tried to make Mr. Churchouse discuss Abel Dinnett.  She told him of an interesting fact.

“I have got Ray to promise a big thing,” she said.  “He hesitated, but he loved me too well to deny me.  Besides, feeling as I do, I couldn’t take any denial.  You see Nature is so much greater than all else to me, and contrasted with her, our little man-made laws, often so mean and hateful in their cowardly caution and cruel injustice, look pitiful and beneath contempt.  And I don’t want to come between Raymond and his eldest son.  I won’t—­I won’t do it.  Abel is his first-born, and it may be cold-blooded of me—­Ray said it was at first—­but I insist on that.  I’ve made him see, and I’ve made father see.  I feel so much about it, that I wouldn’t marry him if he didn’t recognize Abel first and treat him as the first-born ought to be treated.”

“Abel—­Abel Dinnett,” said the other, who had not followed her speech.  “A good-looking boy, but lawless.  He wants the world to bend to him; and yet, if you’ll believe me, there is a vein of fine sentiment in his nature.  With tears in his eyes he once told me that he had seen a fellow pupil at school cruelly killing insects with a burning glass; and he had beaten the cruel lad and broken his glass.  That is all to the good.  The difficulty for him is that he was born out of wedlock.  This great disability could have been surmounted in America, Scotland, Ireland, Germany, or, in fact, anywhere but in England.  The law of the natural child in this country would bring a blush to the cheek of a gorilla.  But neither Church nor State will lift a finger to right the infamy.”

“We are always wanting to pluck the mote out of our neighbour’s eyes, and never see the beam in our own,” she answered.  “Women will alter that some day—­and the disgusting divorce laws, too.  Perhaps these are the first things they will alter, when they have the power.”

“Who is going into Parliament?” he asked.  “Somebody told me, but I forget.  He was a friend of mine.  I remember that much.”

“Ray hopes to get in.  I am going to help him, if I can.”

“It is a great responsibility.  Tell him, if he is elected, to fight for the natural child.  It would well become him to do so.  Let him rise to it.  Our Saviour said, ‘Suffer the little children to come unto Me.’  The State, on the contrary, says, ’Suffer the little children to be done to death and put out of the way.’”

“Yes,” she answered, “suffer fifty thousand little children to be lost every year, because it is kinder to let them perish, than help them to live under the wicked laws we have planned to govern them.”

But his mind collapsed and when she strove to bring it back again, she could not.

Two days before he died, Estelle found him in deep distress.  He begged to see her alone, and explained that he had to confess a great sin.