"Will it really happen, Uncle Mathew?" she asked in an awe-struck
voice when she first heard this.

"It's all bunkum if you ask me," said her uncle. "And it's had a
hardening effect on your aunts who were kind women once, but they're
completely in the hands of the blackguard who runs their chapel,
poor innocents. I'd wring his neck if I caught him."

All this was very fascinating to Maggie who was of a practical mind
with regard to the facts immediately before her but had beyond them
a lively imagination. Her life had been so lonely, spent for the
most part so far from children of her own age, that she had no test
of reality. She did not see any reason why the Lord God should not
come again and she saw every reason why her aunts should condemn her
uncle. That London house swam now in a light struck partly from the
wisdom and omniscience of her aunts, partly from God's threatened
descent upon them.

Aunt Anne's name was no longer mentioned in St.Dreot's but Maggie
did not forget, and at every new tyranny from her father she thought
to herself--"Well, there is London. I shall be there one day."

As they walked Maggie looked at her uncle. What was he really? He
should be a gentleman and yet he didn't look like one. She
remembered things that he had at different times said to her.

"Why, look at myself!" he had on earlier days, half-maudlin from
"his drop at the 'Bull and Bush,'" exclaimed to Maggie, "I can't
call myself a success! I'm a rotten failure if you want to know, and