r," he
said at last. "Please God, she mayn't turn against me altogether for
bringing her such news. I'll be on hand for the next few days, and--you
must explain to Denny that I am to be sent for whenever I am wanted.
That's all,--I suppose we may as well go now, mayn't we?"

Julius knelt at the faldstool, without the altar rails of the chapel,
till the light showed faintly through the grisaille of the
stained-glass windows and outlined the spires and carven canopies of
the stalls. At first his prayers were definite, petitions for mercy and
grace to be outpoured on the fair, young mother and her, seemingly, so
cruelly afflicted child; on himself, too, that he might be permitted to
stay here, and serve her through the difficult future. If she had been
sacred before, Katherine was rendered doubly sacred to him now. He
bowed himself, in reverential awe, before the thought of her martyrdom.
How would her proud and naturally joyous spirit bear the bitter pains
of it? Would it make, eventually, for evil or for good? And then--the
ascetic within him asserting itself, notwithstanding the widening of
outlook produced by the awakening of his heart--he was overtaken by a
great horror of that which we call matter; by a revolt against the
body, and those torments and shames, mental, moral, and physical, which
the body brings along with it. Surely the dualists were right? It was
unregenerate, a thing, if made by God, yet wholly fallen away from Him
and given over to evil, this fleshly envelope wherein the human soul is
seated, and which, even in the womb, may be infected by disease or
rendered hideous by mutilation? Then, as the languor of his long vigil
overcame him, he passed into an ecstatic contemplation of the state of
that same soul after death, clothed with a garment of incorruptible and
enduring beauty, dwelling in clear, luminous spaces, worshipping among
the ranks of the redeemed, beholding its Lord God face to face.

John Knott, meanwhile, after driving home beneath the reeling stars,
through the roar of the forest and shriek of the wind across the open
moors, found an urgent summons awaiting him. He spent the remainder of
that night, not in dreams of paradise and of spirits redeemed from the
thraldom of the flesh, but in increasing the population of this
astonishing planet, by assisting to deliver a scrofulous, half-witted
shrieking servant-girl of twins--illegitimate--in the fusty atmosphere
of a cottage garret, right up