Colin drove the poker into the blazing log, and a squib of sparks shot up. His face in that brightness seemed to shine from some inward illumination.
“Very wise,” he said. “Now another thing. It’s clear to me that you know about the sanctuary. Clever of you, darling, because I’ve only once mentioned it to you, when I settled to build it, telling you old Colin had planned it for his private devotions. Did you guess then I wonder? Did you imagine for what purpose he had planned it, and for what purpose I carried out his plans?”
“It wasn’t a guess,” she said. “I knew. In whose honour must he have planned it, and in whose honour must you have executed it?”
“That’s logical, certainly,” he said. “But how about Grandmamma? I never said a word to her, and I don’t suppose you have. But yet she knows. Has she got some sort of second sight, do you imagine? Is she a sort of incarnated genius of Stanier, so that by instinct she knows all that concerns the welfare of the house? Sometimes I scarcely believe that she’s human at all. Will she go on living for hundreds of years, a sort of priestess? My word, we’re an amazing institution, you know.”
Colin turned round away from the fire, and yet it seemed to her that his face glowed.
“I wish my family were more with me in my convictions,” he said. “Dennis doesn’t know, and you don’t sympathize. Supposing Dennis was to die before he had come to the full knowledge? Once he had chosen, he would be protected——”
Violet felt her mouth go dry.
“Colin, you’re not meaning to take Dennis there, are you?” she whispered.
“Aha, now we come to the root of it,” he said. “Of course I mean to take Dennis there as soon as he’s learnt, well, the rudiments of the faith. I see he’s not fit for it yet, but he soon will be. He’s got high spirits, and the lust of life is beginning to bubble in him. That just has to be directed. Then the moment he is ripe, and a boy like that ripens quickly——”
Violet’s face whitened and hardened.