clung to, wished to carry his daughter with him into his new and most
miserable way of life. But Domini, who, with much of her mother's dark
beauty, had inherited much of her quick vehemence and passion, was also
gifted with brains, and with a certain largeness of temperament and
clearness of insight which Lady Rens lacked. Even when she was still
quivering under the shock and shame of her mother's guilt and her own
solitude, Domini was unable to share her father's intensely egoistic
view of the religion of the culprit. She could not be persuaded that the
faith in which she had been brought up was proved to be a sham because
one of its professors, whom she had above all others loved and trusted,
had broken away from its teachings and defied her own belief. She would
not secede with her father; but remained in the Church of the mother she
was never to see again, and this in spite of extraordinary and dogged
efforts on the part of Lord Rens to pervert her to his own Atheism. His
mind had been so warped by the agony of his heart that he had come to
feel as if by tearing his only child from the religion he had been led
to by the greatest sinner he had known, he would be, in some degree at
least, purifying his life tarnished by his wife's conduct, raising again
a little way the pride she had trampled in the dust.

Her uncle, Father Arlworth, helped Domini by his support and counsel in
this critical period of her life, and Lord Rens in time ceased from the
endeavour to carry his child with him as companion in his tragic journey
from love and belief to hatred and denial. He turned to the violent
occupations of despair, and the last years of his life were hideous
enough, as the world knew and Domini sometimes suspected. But though
Domini had resisted him she was not unmoved or wholly uninfluenced by
her mother's desertion and its effect upon her father. She remained a
Catholic, but she gradually ceased from being a devout one. Although
she had seemed to stand firm she had in truth been shaken, if not in