"Montagu, Montagu, you don't know what you are saying! Those heathen gods that you speak of never existed. There were no such beings."
"Are you sure, auntie?" Montagu asked earnestly. "They sound very real, quite as real, and much cheerfuller than—the Shorter Catechism," he concluded lamely, checked by the unfeigned horror he saw in his aunt's face.
Miss Esperance took off her spectacles and wiped them, then she put them on again and laid her frail old hand over the square, brown little hand lying on her knee, saying gently: "Montagu, dear, you are talking of what you do not understand. It will in no wise be counted against you because you do not understand, but you must not say such things; really, my dear boy, you must not, and it grieves me the more in that I somehow must be in fault. My teaching has in no way been blest if you are so filled with doubts already."
Poor Miss Esperance looked terribly distressed, and the little boy at her knee, who, child as he was, had realised her sweetness and her truth every day of the years he had been with her, wondered, with a sorrowful vagueness, what he could have said to vex her so. And inasmuch as he could find no words to express the thoughts that were in him he flung his arms round his aunt's neck, exclaiming: "I love you so, I won't be an Epicurean if you don't want me to; but you know, dear Auntie, it must have been so happy in those days—there were never any Sabbaths."
Miss Esperance held him close and prayed silently; she even forbore to dilate upon the blessed privileges of that Sabbath which, as she had just been instructing Montagu, "is to be sanctified by a holy resting all that day, even from such worldly employments and recreations as are lawful on other days; and spending the whole time in the public and private exercises of God's worship, except so much as is to be taken up in the works of necessity and mercy."
"Is dinner a necessity or a mercy?" Montagu had asked one day, he himself being distinctly inclined to look upon it as a mercy, for it followed morning church, and after the children came, in deference to a suggestion of Mr. Wycherly's, founded upon certain youthful reminiscences of his own, there was always dessert on Sundays.
Now it happened that on the Sunday previous to Montagu's announcement of his approaching conversion to Epicureanism, the Reverend Peter Gloag had given a lengthy and vigorous discourse on Eternal Punishment. He was a true disciple of Calvin in that he believed that the majority of mankind needed herding into the right path by the sheep-dog of sheer terror as to what would most certainly befall them should they stray from it; and he succeeded in striking dire dismay to the very soul of one small member of his congregation. The minister had also touched upon predestination and election, and Montagu, who was tender-hearted and imaginative, was suddenly panic-stricken by the idea that perhaps he and Edmund, and even Mr. Wycherly, who never came to church, might be already numbered among those whom the Reverend Peter Gloag had denounced as being "rejected, left to sin, to unbelief, and to perdition."
Long after he was put to bed in the big four-post bed, while Edmund slept peacefully in the little bed beside him, did Montagu lie awake wondering whether he would die that night. The very prayer that he said every evening at his aunt's knee took on a new and terrible significance:
If I should die before I wake,
I pray thee, Lord, my soul to take.
Montagu repeated it over and over again with dry lips, while he turned from side to side in a vain endeavour to get away from the constant beating as of a hammer upon an anvil that sounded ceaselessly in his ears.