de hideous by the
hanging bodies of the natives, and children hid their faces and ran by
lest they should see what her Grace had done to their father.

In spite of the Holy Sacrifice, and the piteous banner, and the call to
fight for the faith, the Catholics had hung back and hesitated, and the
catastrophe was complete.

The religion of London, too, was a revelation to this country girl. She
went one Sunday to St. Paul's Cathedral, pausing with her father before
they went in to see the new restorations and the truncated steeple struck
by lightning eight years before, which in spite of the Queen's angry
urging the citizens had never been able to replace.

There was a good congregation at the early morning prayer; and the organs
and the singing were to Isabel as the harps and choirs of heaven. The
canticles were sung to Shephard's setting by the men and children of St.
Paul's all in surplices: and the dignitaries wore besides their grey fur
almuces, which had not yet been abolished. The grace and dignity of the
whole service, though to older people who remembered the unreformed
worship a bare and miserable affair, and to Mr. Norris, with his sincere
simplicity and spirituality, a somewhat elaborate and sensuous mode of
honouring God, yet to Isabel was a first glimpse of what the mystery of
worship meant. The dim towering arches, through which the dusty
richly-stained sunbeams poured, the far-away murmurous melodies that
floated down from the glimmering choir, the high thin pealing organ, all
combined to give her a sense of the unfathomable depths of the Divine
Majesty--an element that was lacking in the clear-cut personal Puritan
creed, in spite of the tender associations that made it fragrant for her,
and the love of the Saviour that enlightened and warmed it. The sight of
the crowds outside, too, in the frosty sunlight, gathered round the grey
stone pulpit on the north-east of the Cathedral, and streaming down every
alley and lane, the packed galleries, the gesticulating black figure of
the preacher--this impressed on her an idea of the power of corporate
religion, that hours at her own prayer-desk, or solitary twilight walks
under the Hall pines, or the uneventful divisions of the Rector's village
sermons, had failed to give.

It was this Sunday in London that awakened her quiet soul from the lonely
companionship of God, to the knowledge of that vast spiritual world of
men of which she was but one tiny cell. Her fat