stroll across the breezy common, yellow in places with upright spikes of small summer furze, and pink with wild pea-blossom.  Bees buzzed, broom crackled, the chirp of the field cricket rang shrill from the sand-banks.  Herminia’s light foot tripped over the spongy turf.  By the top of the furthest ridge, looking down on North Holmwood church, they sat side by side for a while on the close short grass, brocaded with daisies, and gazed across at the cropped sward of Denbies and the long line of the North Downs stretching away towards Reigate.  Tender grays and greens melted into one another on the larches hard by; Betchworth chalk-pit gleamed dreamy white in the middle distance.  They had been talking earnestly all the way, like two old friends together; for they were both of them young, and they felt at once that nameless bond which often draws one closer to a new acquaintance at first sight than years of converse.  “How seriously you look at life,” Alan cried at last, in answer to one of Herminias graver thoughts.  “I wonder what makes you take it so much more earnestly than all other women?”

“It came to me all at once when I was about sixteen,” Herminia answered with quiet composure, like one who remarks upon some objective fact of exernal nature.  “It came to me in listening to a sermon of my father’s,—­which I always look upon as one more instance of the force of heredity.  He was preaching on the text, ‘The Truth shall make you Free,’ and all that he said about it seemed to me strangely alive, to be heard from a pulpit.  He said we ought to seek the Truth before all things, and never to rest till we felt sure we had found it.  We should not suffer our souls to be beguiled into believing a falsehood merely because we wouldn’t take the trouble to find out the Truth for ourselves by searching.  We must dig for it; we must grope after it.  And as he spoke, I made up my mind, in a flash of resolution, to find out the Truth for myself about everything, and never to be deterred from seeking it, and embracing it, and ensuing it when found, by any convention or preconception.  Then he went on to say how the Truth would make us Free, and I felt he was right.  It would open our eyes, and emancipate us from social and moral slaveries.  So I made up my mind, at the same time, that whenever I found the Truth I would not scruple to follow it to its logical conclusions, but would practise it in my life, and let it make me Free with perfect freedom.  Then, in search of Truth, I got my father to send me to Girton; and when I had lighted on it there half by accident, and it had made me Free indeed, I went away from Girton again, because I saw if I stopped there I could never achieve and guard my freedom.  From that day forth I have aimed at nothing but to know the Truth, and to act upon it freely; for, as Tennyson says,—­

’To live by law
Acting the law we live by without fear,
And because right is right to follow right,
Were wisdom in the scorn of consequence.’”