ed to one side, their eyes
listlessly tracing some crack in the old walls, or following the
movement of a distant bough or bird with features petrified almost to
painfulness. Then she looked at Manston; he was already regarding her
with some purpose in his glance.

'It is coming this evening,' she said in her mind. A minute later, at
the end of the hymn, when the congregation began to move out, Manston
came down the aisle. He was opposite the end of her seat as she stepped
from it, the remainder of their progress to the door being in contact
with each other. Miss Aldclyffe had lingered behind.

'Don't let's hurry,' he said, when Cytherea was about to enter the
private path to the House as usual. 'Would you mind turning down this
way for a minute till Miss Aldclyffe has passed?'

She could not very well refuse now. They turned into a secluded path on
their left, leading round through a thicket of laurels to the other gate
of the church-yard, walking very slowly. By the time the further gate
was reached, the church was closed. They met the sexton with the keys in
his hand.

'We are going inside for a minute,' said Manston to him, taking the keys
unceremoniously. 'I will bring them to you when we return.'

The sexton nodded his assent, and Cytherea and Manston walked into the
porch, and up the nave.

They did not speak a word during their progress, or in any way interfere
with the stillness and silence that prevailed everywhere around them.
Everything in the place was the embodiment of decay: the fading
red glare from the setting sun, which came in at the west window,
emphasizing the end of the day and all its cheerful doings, the mildewed
walls, the uneven paving-stones, the wormy pews, the sense of recent
occupation, and the dank air of death which had gathered with the
evening, would have made grave a lighter mood than Cytherea's was then.

'What sensations does the place impress you with?' she said at last,
very sadly.

'I feel imperatively called upon to be honest, from very despair of
achieving anything by stratagem in a world where the materials are such
as these.' He, too, spoke in a depressed voice, purposely or otherwise.

'I feel as if I were almost ashamed to be seen walking such a world,'
she murmured; 'that's the effect it has upon me; but it does not induce
me to be honest particularly.'

He took her hand in both his, and looked down upon the lids of her eyes.

'I pity you sometimes,' he said mo