ts Love

Rejoiced at evil
Be thou never,
But let good give thee pleasure.
Ha'vama'l.

Before the time of the Confessor, the West Minster was little more than
the Monastery chapel, in which the presence of the parish folk, if not
forbidden, was still in no way encouraged. To-day, when the Lord of
Ivarsdale came unnoticed into the dim light while the last strains
of the vesper service were rising, there were no more than a score of
worshippers scattered through the north aisle,--a handful of women,
wives of the Abbot's military tenants, a trader bound for the land
beyond the ford, a couple of yeomen and a hollow-eyed pilgrim, drifting
with the current of his unsteady mind. After a searching glance around
him, the Etheling took up his station in the shelter of a pillar.

"Little danger--or hope--is there than I can miss her," he told himself,
"if she is indeed here, as the page said. Yet of all the unlikely places
to seek her!" he smiled faintly as the figure in elfin green flitted
through his mind. As well look for a wood-nymph at confession--unless
indeed, Elfgiva had taken her there against her will--But that was
scarcely likely, he remembered immediately afterwards, since an
English-woman who had entered into a civil marriage with a Dane would be
little apt to frequent an English church. "Doubtless she makes of it a
meeting place with her newest lover," he concluded. And the anger the
thought gave him, and a sense of the helplessness of his own position,
was so great that he could not remain quiet under it but was tortured
into moving restlessly to and fro in the shadow.

Tender as the gloaming of a summer day was the shade in the great nave,
with the ever-burning candles to remind one of the eternal stars. Now
their quivering light called into life, for one brief moment, the golden
dove that hung above the altar; now it touched with dazzling brightness
the precious service on the holy table itself; again it was veiled by
drifting incense as by heaven's clouds. From the throats of the hidden
choir, the last note swelled rich and full, to roll out over the
pillared aisles in a wave of vibrant sound and pass away in a sigh of
ineffable sweetness under the rafters.

As he bowed his head in the holy hush that followed, the hush of souls
before a wordless bene-diction, some of Sebert's bitterness gave way to
a great compassion. What were we all, when all was told, but wrong-doers
and mourners? Wh