She read on.  Before she ended Dicky had raised himself to a sitting posture.  “The whole business was a dirty shame,” he declared.  “This Ishmael was his own son, eh?  Then why should he cast out one son more than another?”

“There’s a long explanation in the New Testament,” said Ruth.  “It’s by St. Paul; and I dare say that Mr. Hichens too, if he sees anything difficult in it, will say that Ishmael stands for the bond and Isaac for the free, and Abraham had to do it, or the teaching wouldn’t come right.”

“He can’t make out it was fair; nor St. Paul can’t neither, not if you read it to him like you did to me,” asserted Dicky.

“But I shall not,” answered Ruth after a pause, “and it was rather clever of you to guess.”

“Why not?”

“Because it would shock him.  I used to find the Bible just as dull as he makes it out:  but one day I heard Mr. Langton standing up for it.  Mr. Langton said it was the finest book in the world and the most fascinating, if only you read it in the proper way; and the proper way, he said, is to forget all about its being divided into verses and just take it like any other book.  I tried that, and it makes all the difference.”

“You mean to say you like it?” asked Dicky, incredulous.

“I love it.  I can’t get away from the people in it.  They are so splendid, one moment; and, the next, they are just too mean and petty for words; and the queer part of it is, they never see.  They tell falsehoods, and they cheat, and the things they do to get into Palestine are simply disgusting—­even if they had the shadow of a right there, which they haven’t.”

“But the land was promised to them.”

She had a mind to criticise that promise, but checked her lips.  He was a child, and she would do no violence to the child’s mind.

Getting no answer, he considered for a while, and harked back.  “But I don’t see,” he began, and halted, casting about to express himself.  “I don’t see why, if you read it like that to yourself, you should read it differently to old Hichens.  That’s a sort of pretending, you know.”

She turned her eyes on him, and they were straight and honest, as always.  “Oh,” said she, “you are a man, of course!”

Master Dicky blushed with pleasure.

“Men,” she went on, “can go the straight way to get what they wish.  The way is usually hard—­it ought to be hard if the man is worth anything—­but it is always quite straight and simple, else it is wrong.  Now women have to win through men; which means that they must go round about.”

“But old Hichens?”

To herself she might have answered, “He only is allowed to me here.  On whom else can I practise to please?  But, alas!  I practise for a master who never comes!” Aloud she said, “You are excited to-day, Dicky.  You have something to tell me.”

“I should think I had!”

“What is it?”