What you are, root and all, and all in all,
I should know what God and man is.

And from this time forward there is less literature and more life in the
"Commonplace Book."




CHAPTER VI.


Mr. and Lady Adeline Hamilton-Wells, with the inevitable twins, came
constantly to Fraylingay while Evadne was in the schoolroom, and generally
during the holidays, that she might be at liberty to look after the twins,
whose moral obliquities she was supposed to be able to control better than
anybody else. They once told their mother that they liked Evadne, "because
she was so good"; and Lady Adeline had a delicious moment of hope. If the
twins had begun to appreciate goodness they would be better themselves
directly, she was thinking, when Diavolo exclaimed: "We can shock her
easier than anybody," and hope died prematurely. They had been a source of
interest, and also of some concern to Evadne from the first. She took a
grave view of their vagaries, and entertained doubts on the subject of
their salvation should an "all-wise Providence" catch them peering into a
sewer, resolve itself into a poisonous gas, and cut them off suddenly--a
fate which had actually overtaken a small brother of her own who was not a
good little boy either--a fact which was the cause of much painful
reflection to Evadne. She understood all about the drain and the poisonous
gas, but she could not fit in the "all-wise Providence acting only for the
best," which was introduced as primary agent in the sad affair by "their