The Enschede Bible—­the one out of which she read—­had been strangely mutilated.  Sections and pages had been pasted together, and all through both Testaments a word had been blotted out.  The open books she knew by heart; aye, they had been ground into her, morning and night.  One of her duties, after she had been taught to read, had been to read aloud after breakfast and before going to bed.  The same old lines and verses, over and over, until there had come times when shrieking would have relieved her.  How she had hated it!...  All these mumblings which were never explained, which carried no more sense to her brain than they would have carried to Old Morgan’s swearing parrot.  Like the parrot, she could memorize the lines, but she could not understand them.  Never had her father explained.  “Read the first chapter of Job”; beyond that, nothing.  Whenever she came upon the obliterated word and paused, her father would say:  “Faith.  Go on.”  So, after a time, encountering the blot, she herself would supply the word Faith.  But was it Faith?  That is what she was this day going to find out.

She closed her eyes more vividly to recall some line which had carried the blot.  And so she came upon the word Love.  Blotted out—­Love!  With infinite care, through nearly a thousand pages, her father had obliterated the word Love.  Why?  Love was a word of God’s, and yet her father had denied it—­denied it to the Book, denied it to his own flesh and blood.  Why?  He could preach the Word and deny Love!—­tame the savage heart, succour broken white men!—­pray with his face strained with religious fervour!  The idea made her dizzy because it was so inexplicable.  She could accord her father with one grace:  he was not in any manner a hypocrite.  Tender with the sick, firm with the strong, fearless, with a body that had the resistance of iron, there was nothing of the hypocrite in him.

She recalled him.  A gaunt, powerful man:  no feature of his face decided, and yet for all that it had the significance of a countenance hewn out of rock.  Never had he corrected her with hand or whip, the ring in his voice had always been sufficient to cower her.  But never had the hand touched her with a father’s caress; never had he taken her into his arms; never had he kissed her.  She had never been “My child” or “My dear”; always her name—­Ruth.

Love, obliterated, annihilated; out of his heart and out of his Bible.  Why?  Here was a curtain indeed.  No matter.  It was ended.  She herself had cut the slender tie that had bound them.  Ah, but she could remember; and many things there were that she would never forgive.  Sometimes—­a lonely forlorn child—­she had gone to him and put her arms around his neck.  Stonily he had disengaged himself.  “I forbid you to do that.”  She had brought home a puppy one day.  He had taken it back.  He destroyed her clumsily made dolls whenever he found them.

Once she had asked him:  “Are you my father?”