But if you are disposed to accept my offer--and enrolment among us gives you at once your natural place in this planet and your best security against the enmity you have incurred and will incur here--I should prefer to make the rest of the explanation that must precede your admission in presence of my family.

The first step, the preliminary instruction in our creed and our simpler mysteries, which is the work of the Novitiate, is a solemn epoch in the lives of our children.

They are not trusted with our secret till we can rely on the maturity of their intelligence and loyalty of their nature.

Eveena would in any case have been received as a novice within some dozen days.

It will now be easy for me, considering her education and intelligence and my own position in the Order, to obtain, for her as for you, exemption from the usual probation on proof that you both know all that is usually taught therein, and admission on the same occasion; and it will add solemnity and interest to her first initiation, that this chief lesson of her life should be shared this evening with him to whom she owes it that she lives to enter the society, to which her ancestors have belonged since its institution." We passed into the peristyle, where the ladies were as usual assembled; but the children had been dismissed, and of the maidens Eveena only was present.