answered in a low voice.

"Houses are for monks and nuns!" he rejoined heartily. "Give me God's
heaven."

"The earth is His, but we deface it," she murmured, reverting to her
thoughts, and unconscious that it was to him she spoke.

He looked at her sharply, but the fire was not yet kindled; and in the
gloaming her face was a pale blot undecipherable. He stood a moment, but
she did not speak again; and Madame St. Lo bustling up, he moved away to
give an order. By-and-by the fires burned up, and showed the pillared
aisle in which they sat, small groups dotted here and there on the floor
of Nature's cathedral. Through the shadowy Gothic vaulting, the groining
of many boughs which met overhead, a rare star twinkled, as through some
clerestory window; and from the dell below rose in the night, now the
monotonous chanting of the frogs, and now, as some great bull-frog took
the note, a diapason worthy of a Brescian organ. The darkness walled all
in; the night was still; a falling caterpillar sounded. Even the rude
men at the farthest fire stilled their voices at times; awed, they knew
not why, by the silence and vastness of the night.

The Countess long remembered that vigil--for she lay late awake; the cool
gloom, the faint wood-rustlings, the distant cry of fox or wolf, the soft
glow of the expiring fires that at last left the world to darkness and
the stars; above all, the silent wheeling of the planets, which spoke
indeed of a supreme Ruler, but crushed the heart under a sense of its
insignificance, and of the insignificance of all human revolutions.

"Yet, I believe!" she cried, wrestling upwards, wrestling with herself.
"Though I have seen what I have seen, yet I believe!"

And though she had to bear what she had to bear, and do that from which
her soul shrank! The woman, indeed, within her continued to cry out
against this tragedy ever renewed in her path, against this necessity for
choosing evil, or good, ease for herself or life for others. But the
moving heavens, pointing onward to a time when good and evil alike should
be past, strengthened a nature essentially noble; and before she slept no
shame and no suffering seemed--for the moment at least--too great a price
to pay for the lives of little children. Love had been taken from her
life; the pride which would fain answer generosity with generosity--that
must go, too!

She felt no otherwise when the day came, and the bustle of the start and
the comm