The Extraordinary Confessions of Diana Please

Have you not noticed, my little friend, how the wicked are always the superstitious? It is because life is to them full of dark corners, in which the unsuspected hides. The atheist will still be for baiting a deity whose existence he denies; he will wring a response from a vacuum, which failing, he fears to canvass emptiness for the reason.

Dr. Peel knew well the impotence of virtue to conquer. He saw it of such poor force in the world as to figure of no moment at all in a contest with vice. He did not fear God, but he feared that the devil was God, and vindictive where the harming of his protégées -- of whom he had no thought but that I must be one -- was concerned. He had been eye-witness of the, to him unaccountable, foiling of his project; and it struck him as if he had fallen upon an ambush in one of those dark corners. He shrunk back terrified, and thenceforth exchanged his noisome attentions to me for an attitude of propitiation which was as unwelcome, and even more stultifying, in seeming, to my hopes, inasmuch as it included an increased jealous concern for my safeguarding. But there, in the end, his service of his dark master was made to recoil upon his own head, through his very scepticism of the more divinely cunning power which works for good.