her life would close in a
convent, like that of other hapless Englishwomen whose personal property excited
the covetousness of the Pope. In the Bartles newspaper there had appeared, from
time to time, enigmatic paragraphs, which Mrs. Welland and her intimates made
the subject of much gossip; these passages alluded either to a certain new
chapel which seemed very long in getting its foundations laid, or to a certain
former inhabitant of Bartles, who found it necessary, owing to the sad state of
her health, to make long residence in Roman Catholic countries. Mrs. Fletcher
had preserved these newspapers, and now produced them. Miriam read and smiled.
    »Why didn't it occur to them to suggest that I had become an atheist?«
    Mrs. Fletcher screamed with horror. No, no; Bartles did not contain any one
so malicious as that. After all, whatever had been said was merely the outcome
of a natural disappointment. All would be put right again. To-morrow was Sunday,
and when Miriam appeared in the chapel -
    »I have no intention of going to chapel.«
 
On Monday morning she returned to London. Excepting Mrs. Fletcher and her
daughters, she had spoken with no one in Bartles. She came away with a
contemptuous hatred of the place - a resolve never to see it again.
    This had been the one thing needed to make Miriam as intolerant in
agnosticism as she formerly was in dogma. Henceforth she felt the animosity of a
renegade. In the course of a few hours her soul had completed its
transformation, and at the incitement of that pride which had always been the
strongest motive within her. Her old faith was now identified with the cackle of
Bartles, and she flung it behind her with disdain.
    Not that she felt insulted by the supposition that she had turned Romanist.
No single reason would account for her revolt, which, coming thus late, was all
but as violent as that which had animated her brother from his boyhood.
Intellectual progress had something to do with it, for on approaching with new
eyes that narrow provincial life, she could scarcely believe it had once been
her own, and resented the memory of such a past. But less worthy promptings were
more strongly operative. The Bartles folk had a certain measure of right against
her; she had ostentatiously promised them a chapel, and how was her failure in
keeping the promise to be accounted for? This justification of theirs chafed
her; she felt the ire of one who has no right to be angry. It shamed her,
moreover, to be reminded of the pretentious spirit