ns, returned at the end of the month with the news that the fleet
had sailed again on the thirteenth, and that Hubert was gone with it; so
Lady Maxwell, now more silent and retired than ever, for the present
retained her old position and Mr. Piers took charge of the estate.

Although Isabel outwardly was very little changed in the last six years,
great movements had been taking place in her soul, and if Hubert had only
known the state of the case, possibly he would not have gone so hastily
with Mr. Drake.

The close companionship of such an one as Mistress Margaret was doing its
almost inevitable work; and the girl had been learning that behind the
brilliant and even crude surface of the Catholic practice, there lay
still and beautiful depths of devotion which she had scarcely dreamed of.
The old nun's life was a revelation to Isabel; she heard from her bed in
the black winter mornings her footsteps in the next room, and soon learnt
that Mistress Margaret spent at least two hours in prayer before she
appeared at all. Two or three times in the day she knew that she retired
again for the same purpose, and again an hour after she was in bed, there
were the same gentle movements next door. She began to discover, too,
that for the Catholic, as well as for the Puritan, the Person of the
Saviour was the very heart of religion; that her own devotion to Christ
was a very languid flame by the side of the ardent inarticulate passion
of this soul who believed herself His wedded spouse; and that the worship
of the saints and the Blessed Mother instead of distracting the love of
the Christian soul rather seemed to augment it. The King of Love stood,
as she fancied sometimes, to Catholic eyes, in a glow of ineffable
splendour; and the faces of His adoring Court reflected the ruddy glory
on all sides; thus refracting the light of their central Sun, instead of,
as she had thought, obscuring it.

Other difficulties, too, began to seem oddly unreal and intangible, when
she had looked at them in the light of Mistress Margaret's clear old eyes
and candid face. It was a real event in her inner life when she first
began to understand what the rosary meant to Catholics. Mistress Corbet
had told her what was the actual use of the beads; and how the mysteries
of Christ's life and death were to be pondered over as the various
prayers were said; but it had hitherto seemed to Isabel as if this method
were an elaborate and superstitious substitute