to
pieces. But then I suppose you would say that she was a superstition,
too. And where is the old altar? Is that broken, too? And is that a
superstition, too? What a number there must have been! And the holy
water, too, I see. But that looks a very nice table up there you have
instead. Ah! And I see you read the new prayers from a new desk outside
the screen, and not from the priest's stall. Was that a superstition too?
And the mass vestments? Has your wife had any of them made up to be
useful? The stoles are no good, I fear; but you could make charming
stomachers out of the chasubles."

They were walking slowly up the centre aisle now. Mr. Dent had to explain
that the vestments had been burnt on the green.

"Ah! yes; I see," she said, "and do you wear a surplice, or do you not
like them? I see the chancel roof is all broken--were there angels there
once? I suppose so. But how strange to break them all! Unless they are
superstitions, too? I thought Protestants believed in them; but I see I
was wrong. What _do_ you believe in, Mr. Dent?" she asked, turning large,
bright, perplexed eyes upon him for a moment: but she gave him no time
to answer.

"Ah!" she cried suddenly, and her voice rang with pain, "there is the
altar-stone." And she went down on her knees at the chancel entrance,
bending down, it seemed, in an agony of devout sorrow and shame; and
kissed with a gentle, lingering reverence the great slab with its five
crosses, set in the ground at the destruction of the altar to show there
was no sanctity attached to it.

She knelt there a moment or two, her lips moving, and her black eyes cast
up at the great east window, cracked and flawed with stones and poles.
The Puritan boy and girl looked at her with astonishment; they had not
seen this side of her before.

When she rose from her knees, her eyes seemed bright with tears, and her
voice was tender.

"Forgive me, Mr. Dent," she said, with a kind of pathetic dignity,
putting out a slender be-ringed hand to him, "but--but you know--for I
think perhaps you have some sympathy for us poor Catholics--you know what
all this means to me."

She went up into the chancel and looked about her in silence.

"This was the piscina, Mistress Corbet," said the Rector.

She nodded her head regretfully, as at some relic of a dead friend; but
said nothing. They came out again presently, and turned through the old
iron gates into what had been the Maxwell chapel. The centre