nated.

He was now close to the church. It was a little, low, ancient
structure, with a small, quaint, open belfry, beautifully proportioned,
and all built out of a soft and mellow grey stone. The grass grew long
in the churchyard, which was not so much neglected as wisely left
alone, and an abundance of pink mallow, growing very thickly, gave a
touch of bright colour to the grass. He stopped for a while
considering the grave of a child, who had died at the age of five
years, with an artless epitaph painted on a wooden cross. The grave
was piously tended, though it bore a date of some ten years back; there
were little rose-trees growing there, and a border of pansies, all the
work, Hugh fancied, of children, doing gentle honour to a dead sister;
whom they thought of, no doubt, as lying below in all her undimmed
childish beauty; the pale face, the waxen limbs, the flowing hair, as
they had looked their last upon her, waiting in a quiet sleep for the
dawn of that other morning. How much better to think of her so, than
of the dreadful reality which Hugh, in a sudden, almost terrified,
flash of fancy, knew to be lying, an almost insupportable blot upon all
that was fair and seemly, in the stained and mouldered coffin. Yet
there was a place for that difficult horror too in the scheme of
things, though the thought seemed almost to taint the sweet air of the
place.

This was only one of the parts of the great mystery over which he
brooded so often; the noisome things of the world, its weakness, its
decay; the shivering repugnance of the spirit, the almost impossibility
of joy or courage in the presence of such thoughts; that was the
strangest part of it, the rebellion of the inmost central spirit
against what was so natural, so common. Death was harsh enough, but
that it should be attended with such an extremity of disgrace and
degradation--that seemed an intolerable thing.

Yet to the charnel-worm, rioting in all the horror of decay, there
could be nothing but a blind joy in the conditions which Hugh hardly
even dared to imagine. To indulge such thoughts was morbid, perhaps.
But here they presented themselves at every turn, and Hugh felt that to
turn his back upon them was but to shirk the part of the problem that
he disliked. Not so could he attain to any knowledge of the secret of
things. The horror must not of course be unduly emphasised; the
morbidity lay there, in the danger of seeing things out of due
prop