d the
opulent ease of its guests without kindling, opened to their first
emotion,--wonder! At which Lady Elfrida, who had ingenuously admired
him, hated him a little, as the first step towards a kindlier feeling.

The next day, having declared his intention of visiting Ashley Church,
and, as frankly, his intention of going there alone, he slipped out in
the afternoon and made his way quietly through the park to the square
ivied tower he had first seen. In this tranquil level length of the wood
there was the one spot, the churchyard, where, oddly enough, the green
earth heaved into little billows as if to show the turbulence of that
life which those who lay below them had lately quitted. It was a
relief to the somewhat studied and formal monotony of the well-ordered
woodland,--every rood, of which had been paced by visitors, keepers, or
poachers,--to find those decrepit and bending tombstones, lurching
at every angle, or deeply sinking into the green sea of forgetfulness
around them. All this, and the trodden paths of the villagers towards
that common place of meeting, struck him as being more human than
anything he had left behind him at the Grange.

He entered the ivy-grown porch and stared for a moment at the half-legal
official parochial notices posted on the oaken door,--his first
obtrusive intimation of the combination of church and state,--and
hesitated. He was not prepared to find that this last resting-place of
his people had something to do with taxes and tithes, and that a certain
material respectability and security attended his votive sigh. God and
the reigning sovereign of the realm preserved a decorous alliance in the
royal arms that appeared above the official notices. Presently he pushed
open the door gently and entered the nave. For a moment it seemed to him
as if the arched gloom of the woods he had left behind was repeated
in the dim aisle and vaulted roof; there was an earthy odor, as if the
church itself, springing from the fertilizing dust below, had taken root
in the soil; the chequers of light from the faded stained-glass windows
fell like the flicker of leaves on the pavement. He paused before the
cold altar, and started, for beside him lay the recumbent figure of
a warrior pillowed on his helmet with the paraphernalia of his trade
around him. A sudden childish memory of the great Western plains, and
the biers of the Indian "braves" raised on upright poles against the
staring sky and above the