iritual life which
in intensity and purity surpassed any she had ever experienced or even
imagined; and yet the heart of it all was the mass. She thought of the
old wrinkled quiet face when she came back to breakfast at the Dower
House: she had soon learnt to read from that face whether mass had been
said that morning or not at the Hall. And Mistress Margaret was only one
of thousands to whom this little set of actions half seen and words half
heard, wrought and said by a man in a curious dress, were more precious
than all meditation and prayer put together. Could the vast
superstructure of prayer and effort and aspiration rest upon a piece of
empty folly such as children or savages might invent?

Then very naturally, as she began now to get quieter and less excited,
she passed on to the spiritual side of it.

Had that indeed happened that Mistress Margaret believed--that the very
Body and Blood of her own dear Saviour, Jesus Christ, had in virtue of
His own clear promise--His own clear promise!--become present there under
the hands of His priest? Was it, indeed,--this half-hour action,--the
most august mystery of time, the Lamb eternally slain, presenting Himself
and His Death before the Throne in a tremendous and bloodless
Sacrifice--so august that the very angels can only worship it afar off
and cannot perform it; or was it all a merely childish piece of
blasphemous mummery, as she had been brought up to believe? And then this
Puritan girl, who was beginning to taste the joys of release from her
misery now that she had taken this step, and united a whole-hearted
offering of herself to the perfect Offering of her Lord--now her soul
made its first trembling movement towards a real external authority. "I
believe," she rehearsed to herself, "not because my spiritual experience
tells me that the Mass is true, for it does not; not because the Bible
says so, because it is possible to interpret that in more than one way;
but because that Society which I now propose to treat as Divine--the
Representative of the Incarnate Word--nay, His very mystical Body--tells
me so: and I rely upon that, and rest in her arms, which are the Arms of
the Everlasting, and hang upon her lips, through which the Infallible
Word speaks."

And so Isabel, in a timid peace at last, from her first act of Catholic
faith, fell asleep.

She awoke to find the winter sun streaming into her room, and Mistress
Margaret by her bedside.

"Dear child," sai