" which was upon her tongue because the
proposition, even for purposes of illustration, that a nobleman could
ever have offered her a new frock seemed to have in itself something of
the scandalous and unfitting.

"I should have been delighted, but, dear me! in those days people were
so blind as never to think of restorations. We used to sit in quite
_comfortable_ seats every Sunday, with cushions and hassocks, and the
aisles were paved with flagstones--simple worn flagstones, and none of
the caustic tiles which look so much more handsome; though I am always
afraid I am going to slip, and glad to be off them, they are so hard and
shiny. Church matters were very behindhand then. All round the walls
were tablets that people had put up to their relations, white caskets on
black marble slates, and urns and cherubs' heads, and just opposite
where I used to sit a poor lady, whose name I have forgotten, weeping
under a willow-tree. No doubt they were very much out of place in the
sanctuary, as the young gentleman said in his lecture on `How to make
our Churches Beautiful' in the Town Hall last winter. He called them
`mural blisters,' my dear, but there was no talk of removing them in my
young days, and that was, I dare say, because there was no one to give
the money for it. But now, here is this good young nobleman, Lord
Blandamer, come forward so handsomely, and I have no doubt at Cullerne
all will be much improved ere long. We are not meant to _loll_ at our
devotions, as the lecturer told us. That was his word, to `_loll_'; and
they will be sure to take away the baize and hassocks, though I do hope
there will be a little strip of _something_ on the seats; the bare wood
is apt to make one ache sometimes. I should not say it to anyone else
in the world but you, but it _does_ make me ache a little sometimes; and
when the caustic is put down in the aisle, I shall take your arm, my
dear, to save me from slipping. Here is Lord Blandamer going to do all
this for us, and you do not show yourself in the least grateful. It is
not becoming in a young girl."

"Dear aunt, what would you have me do? I cannot go and thank him
publicly in the name of the town. That would be still more unbecoming;
and I am sure I hope they will not do all the dreadful things in the
church that you speak of. I love the old monuments, and like _lolling_
much better than bare forms."

So she would laugh the matter off; but if she could not be ind