To end her story she told Richard that, since their coming to this country, her mother’s favourite of the boys had died. She went nearly mad, she said, and had never been herself again. Not only had her opposition to her husband deepened into hate, but she came to hate God also.

“Isn’t it awful?” Barbara said, but she met no response in the honest eyes of Richard, to whom it was not such an awful thing at all.

“I have heard her say the wildest and wickedest things, whether anyone could hear her or not. There are devils going about in New Zealand. Nobody knows of that here, but it was here they got into my mother and made her defy God. She does it straight out in church. That is why I always sit in the poor seats, and not in the little gallery that belongs to my father.—Have you ever been to our church, Mr. Tuke?”

Richard told her he never went to church except when his mother wanted him to go with her.

“My mother goes twice every Sunday, but what do you think she is doing all the time? She lies there on a couch in our gallery, in a nest of pillows, in full view of the clergyman and everyone, and reads a novel, a yellow French one, generally.”

“She disapproves of the whole thing?” said Richard.

“She used to like church well enough.”

“She must do it to protest. Otherwise why would she go? Does she have a quarrel with the clergyman?”

“None that I know of.”

“Then why does she go and not take part?”

“I believe she does it just to let God know she is angry with him. She thinks he has treated her cruelly and tyrannically, and she will not pretend to worship him. She wants to show him how bitterly she feels the way he has turned against her.”

The absurdity of the thing struck Richard, but he didn’t want to hurt the girl.

“Has the clergyman ever spoken to her about it?”

“I don’t think so. I would speak to her fast enough if it were my church.”

“He probably thinks her mind affected and doesn’t want to make her worse,” said Richard. “But I would think he might persuade her that, as she is not on good terms with the person who lives in the church, she ought to stay away.”

Barbara looked at him doubtfully, but Richard went on.

“What sort of man is the clergyman?” he asked.

“I don’t know. He seems to be always thinking about things, always asking questions and never giving the answers. Maybe he doesn’t know them himself. I suppose he is a rather stupid man.”

“That does not necessarily follow,” said Richard with a smile, reflecting on the complexity of the questions which confronted him concerning his own trade. “Your poor mother must be very unhappy,” he added.

“I suppose. I am no comfort to her. She never pays any attention to me, or she tells me to go amuse myself—she is busy. My father has his twin, and poor mama has nobody.”