ched Isabel far more than the destruction of the
images; and she went forward timidly and said something; but the old man
turned on her a face of such misery and anger that she had run straight
out of the church, and joined Anthony as he danced on the green.

On the following Sunday the old priest was not there, and a fervent young
minister from London had taken his place, and preached a stirring sermon
on the life and times of Josiah; and Isabel had thanked God on her knees
after the sermon for that He had once more vindicated His awful Name and
cleansed His House for a pure worship.

But the very centre of Isabel's religion was the love of the Saviour. The
Puritans of those early days were very far from holding a negative or
colourless faith. Not only was their belief delicately dogmatic to
excess; but it all centred round the Person of the Lord Jesus Christ. And
Isabel had drunk in this faith from her father's lips, and from
devotional books which he gave her, as far back as she could remember
anything. Her love for the Saviour was even romantic and passionate. It
seemed to her that He was as much a part of her life, and of her actual
experience, as Anthony or her father. Certain places in the lanes about,
and certain spots in the garden, were sacred and fragrant to her because
her Lord had met her there. It was indeed a trouble to her sometimes that
she loved Anthony so much; and to her mind it was a less worthy kind of
love altogether; it was kindled and quickened by such little external
details, by the sight of his boyish hand brown with the sun, and scarred
by small sporting accidents, such as the stroke of his bird's beak or
talons, or by the very outline of the pillow where his curly head had
rested only an hour or two ago. Whereas her love for Christ was a deep
and solemn passion that seemed to well not out of His comeliness or even
His marred Face or pierced Hands, but out of His wide encompassing love
that sustained and clasped her at every moment of her conscious attention
to Him, and that woke her soul to ecstasy at moments of high communion.
These two loves, then, one so earthly, one so heavenly, but both so
sweet, every now and then seemed to her to be in slight conflict in her
heart. And lately a third seemed to be rising up out of the plane of
sober and quiet affections such as she felt for her father, and still
further complicating the apparently encountering claims of love to God
and man.

Isabel g