“What dear?”
“Oh, I don’t think I know,” said she, with a short laugh. “Come on! Gru! Look at the table covered with books and things! I knew it was an exam! Look, Dacre!”
When her greetings to her host and hostess were over, Mrs. Fellowes went over to her husband, who was standing by the table of books.
“One of the evidences of Christianity to be placed before the infant mind,” he said softly, pointing to Lord Amberley. “Another!” and he put his finger on Renan’s Life of Jesus.
“Good gracious! you’ll stop that?”
“If I can—what’s wrong with Gwen?”
“I don’t know, I put my foot in it just now by pressing for an explanation.”
Dacre, meanwhile, was feeling less than a worm under the concentrated gaze of his parents. After the first remarks concerning health addressed to both children, with a casual allusion to his projected departure for school for Dacre’s benefit, and an earnest request from his mother to consider his teeth and his stomach and to eschew sweet-stuff, “the great temptation of public schools,” she observed sadly, and when some supine observations with regard to things in general had been turned on Gwen, Mr. and Mrs. Waring looked appealingly at each other and subsided into a silent and curious inspection of their son.
The dumb endurance of the boy showed a good deal of pluck; he merely wriggled spasmodically from time to time. But he had come to the extremest end of his tether and was on the point of some outbreak, when deliverance reached him in a low swift sigh from his mother, and a queer sudden movement on his father’s part, who pushed back his chair, loosed his wife’s hand with a deprecating “Pray, my love!” and began to speak in a general inoffensive way, fixing his gaze on no one in particular, to Dacre’s infinite relief.
“There are subjects that are usually comprised in the education of young children,” said he, “which we, after deep and anxious thought, have seen fit to omit from the curriculum of our son and daughter. We have taken special pains to impress upon their various instructors, as also upon the persons appointed to their personal service, that a certain part of their minds should be kept free, entirely clear and free from certain impressions, that they should remain, so to speak, a blank as far as regards this form of knowledge. The form of knowledge I allude to—” he continued, his eye falling once more on the luckless Dacre who was drinking in his words with open-eyed wonder, and, finding the boy useful as a target, he fixed him inexorably until the end of the discourse. “The form of knowledge I allude to is that known as the knowledge of religion. It is sometimes called a sense, and has in a manner become so by heredity, but I doubt much whether it was innate in the race in the beginning. This point of view has of course powerful advocates, as we all know, at least—” he added coughing nervously, “as Mr. Fellowes and his wife know. However, this question though most interesting is not necessary to my explanation.”