Certainly if the penance paid by the reader is any test, the novelist was successful in her effort to atone for the looseness of her early writings, when she left the province of fiction for that of the periodical essay.

In contrition I stood, and I hope the penance was expiatory.'

Grace was opposed to penance, while penance was the form which religion took; and as predestination was a theological sequence of grace, it was distasteful to the Mediaeval Church.

The penance was your owne though I did fast.

But penance, on the whole, was the ruling power, and cast over society its funereal veil of dreariness and fear.