Why should she begin to ask herself if she really loved George Holland; if the feeling she had for him should be called by the name of love, or by some other name that did not mean just the same thing?  Of course she had thought a good deal—­though her father did not know it—­of love.  She had seen upon other people the effect of the possession of this gift of love, how it had caused them to forget pain and poverty, and shame, and infamy, and God, and death, and hell.  Ah! that was love—­that was love! and she had hoped that one day such a gift of love would be given to her; for it was surely the thing that was best worth having in the world!  Once or twice she had fancied that it was at the point of being given to her.  There had been certain thrilling passages between herself and two men,—­an interval of a year between each,—­and there had also been a kiss in an alcove designed by her dearest friend, Ella Linton, for the undoing of mankind, a place of softened lights and shadowy palms.  It was her recollection of these incidents that had caused her to fumble with the blind cord when her father had been suggesting to her the disadvantages of inexperience in matters of the heart.  But the incidents had led to nothing, except, perhaps, a week or two of remorse.  But she could not help feeling, when that month of curious doubt was upon her, that the little thrill which she had felt when one man had put his arm around her for an instant, when another man—­he was very young—­had put his lips upon her mouth—­it was a straightforward kiss—­suggested a nearer approach to love than she had yet been conscious of in the presence of George Holland. (He had never done more than kiss her hand.  Is it on record that any man did more when dressed with the severity of the cleric?)

This was a terrible impression for a young woman to retain before her engagement to a man has passed into its third month.  Then she began to wonder if all her previous ideas—­all her previous aspirations—­were mistaken.  She began to wonder if this was the reality of love—­this conviction that there was nothing in the whole world that she would welcome with more enthusiasm than an announcement on the part of her father that he was going on a voyage to Australia, and that he meant to take her with him.

And then——­

Well, then she threw herself upon her bed and wept for an hour one evening, and for two hours (at intervals) another evening; and then looked up the old published speeches made by a certain cabinet minister in his irresponsible days, on a question which he had recently introduced.  Her father was bitterly opposed to the most recent views of the minister, and was particularly anxious to confront him with his own phrases of thirty years back.  She spent four hours copying out the words which were now meant by Mr. Ayrton to confound the utterer.

CHAPTER III.

The bishop knew something of man, and he knew something of the church; he even knew something of the Bible.