panions, and they, a beautiful young woman and an old man dressed in
the sober garb of a Catholic ecclesiastic of that day, glanced at one
another apprehensively.

All England was then sharply divided into two camps, the one composed of
those who welcomed with enthusiasm the wonderful new invention which
obliterated space, the other of those who dreaded and abhorred the
coming of the railroads.

Charles Nagle got up and walked to the end of the terrace. He stared
down into the wooded combe, or ravine, below, and noted with sullen
anger the signs of stir and activity in the narrow strip of wood which
till a few weeks before had been so still, so entirely remote from
even the quiet human activities of 1835.

At last he turned round, pirouetting on his heel with a quick movement,
and his good looks impressed anew each of the two who sat there with
him. Eighty years ago beauty of line and colour were allowed to tell in
masculine apparel, and this young Dorset squire delighted in fine
clothes. Though November was far advanced it was a mild day, and Charles
Nagle wore a bright blue coat, cut, as was then the fashion, to show off
the points of his elegant figure--of his slender waist and his broad
shoulders; as for the elaborately frilled waistcoat, it terminated in an
India muslin stock, wound many times round his neck. He looked a foppish
Londoner rather than what he was--an honest country gentleman who had
not journeyed to the capital for some six years, and then only to see a
great physician.

"'Twas a most unneighbourly act on the part of James--he knows it well
enough, for we hardly see him now!" He addressed his words more
particularly to his wife, and he spoke more gently than before.

The old priest--his name was Dorriforth--looked uneasily from his host
to his hostess. He felt that both these young people, whom he had known
from childhood, and whom he loved well, had altered during the few weeks
which had gone by since he had last seen them. Rather--he mentally
corrected himself--it was the wife, Catherine, who was changed. Charles
Nagle was much the same; poor Charles would never be other, for he
belonged to the mysterious company of those who, physically sound, are
mentally infirm, and shunned by their more fortunate fellows.

But Charles Nagle's wife, the sweet young woman who for so long had been
content, nay glad, to share this pitiful exile, seemed now to have
escaped, if not in body then in mind, from th