Her father’s desire was to see her so well married as to raise his own influence in the county. He was proud of her—selfishly proud. All the credit of her he considered to be his. He forgot even what share her mother might claim. But her mother, too, was proud of her—loved her indeed in a careless fashion. Notwithstanding the mother’s coarseness, her outbursts of temper, her intolerance of opposition, she and her daughter had never yet come into collision. The reason did not entirely lie in the sweetness of the daughter, but partly in the fact that the mother had two children besides, one of whom she loved far more, and the other far less.

As for herself, Barbara would never think of love until she fell in love. A flower cannot know its own blossom until it comes. It did not yet interest her, and until it did, marriage certainly never would. When she came to England it was hard to teach her the ways of the so-called civilized. Servants would sometimes be out searching for her after midnight, perhaps to find her out on the solitary heath beyond the park. She knew most of the stars, had tales and wild myths of her own, and loved the moon, the ocean, and the fields.

As to what is commonly called education, she had not had the best. Since coming to England she had had governesses, but none fit for the office. None of them possessed that rare gift, the teaching genius—the faculty of waking hunger and thirst. But that would have mattered little, for Barbara needed no such rousing—she was eager to know, and yet more eager to understand. But not one of those teachers knew enough to answer a quarter of Barbara’s questions, or was even capable of perceiving that those she could not answer pointed to anything worth knowing.

She had never been taught any religion, but from her earliest recollection she had had the feeling of a Presence. For this feeling she never thought of attempting to account. Neither would she have recognized it as what I have called it. The sky over her head brought it, as did any horizon far or near. But when she went to church, none of the Presence came near her. She had no idea of ever having done wrong, no feeling that God was pleased or displeased with her, or had any occasion to be either. She did not know that it was God that came near her in her horse, in her dog, in the people about her who so often disappointed her. He came nearer in a thunderstorm, a moonlit night, a sweet wind—anything that woke the sense of the old freedom of her childhood. She felt the presence then, but never knew it a presence.

Neither did she know that there was a place where that Presence was always awaiting her—a place called in a certain old book “thy closet.” She did not know that there opened the one horizon—infinitely far, yet near as her own heart. But he is there for those that seek him, not for those who do not look for him. Until they do, all he can do is to make them feel the want of him. Barbara had not begun to seek him. She did not know there was anybody to seek. She only missed him without knowing what she missed.