eace that draws the eyes up in an ecstasy of sight, but
a bathing in it, and an envelopment in it, of every fibre of life; when
the lungs draw deep breaths of it; and the heart beats in it, and the
eyes are enlightened by it; when the things of earth become at once
eternal and fixed and of infinite value, and at the same instant of less
value than the dust that floats in space; when there no longer appears
any distinction between the finite and the eternal, between time and
infinity; when the soul for that moment at least finds that rest that is
the magnet and the end of all human striving; and that comfort which
wipes away all tears.

CHAPTER V

I

It was the sixth night after Dick Sampson had come back with news of Mr.
Alban; and he had already received instructions as to how he was to go
twenty-four hours later. He was to walk, as before, starting after dark,
not carrying a letter this time, after all, in spite of the news that he
might have taken with him; for the priest would be back before morning
and could hear it all then at his ease.

Every possible cause of alarm had gone; and Marjorie, for the first time
for three weeks, felt very nearly as content as a year ago. Not one more
doubtful visitor had appeared anywhere; and now she thought herself
mistaken even about those solitary figures she had suspected before.
After all, they had only been a couple of men, whose faces her servants
did not know, who had gone past on the track beneath the house; one
mounted, and the other on foot.

There had been something of a reaction, too, in Derby. The deaths of the
three priests had made an impression; there was no doubt of that. Mr.
Biddell had written her a letter on the point, saying that the blood of
those martyrs might well be the peace, if it might not be the seed, of
the Church in the district. Men openly said in the taverns, he reported,
that it was hard that any should die for religion merely; politics were
one matter and religion another. Yet the deaths had dismayed the simple
Catholics, too, for the present; and at Hathersage church, scarcely ten
miles away, above two hundred came to the Protestant sermon preached
before my lord Shrewsbury on the first Sunday after.

The news of the Armada, too, had distracted men's minds wonderfully in
another direction. News had come in already, she was informed, of an
engagement or two in the English Channel, all in favour of its
defenders. More than that was n