and showed
the thick, clumsy ankles of a true peasant-maid, they could only sigh out
their unspeakable satisfaction.

Gardens embowered and perfumed the low cottages, through the open doors
of which they could see the exquisite neatness of the life within. One of
the doors opened into a school-house, where they beheld with rapture the
school-mistress, book in hand, and with a quaint cap on her gray head,
and encircled by her flock of little boys and girls.

By and by it began to rain again; and now while their driver stopped to
put up the top of the barouche, they entered a country church which had
taken their fancy, and walked up the aisle with the steps that blend with
silence rather than break it, while they heard only the soft whisper of
the shower without. There was no one there but themselves. The urn of
holy water seemed not to have been troubled that day, and no penitent
knelt at the shrine, before which twinkled so faintly one lighted lamp.
The white roof swelled into dim arches over their heads; the pale day
like a visible hush stole through the painted windows; they heard
themselves breathe as they crept from picture to picture.

A narrow door opened at the side of the high altar, and a slender young
priest appeared in a long black robe, and with shaven head. He, too as he
moved with noiseless feet, seemed a part of the silence; and when he
approached with dreamy black eyes fixed upon them, and bowed courteously,
it seemed impossible he should speak. But he spoke, the pale young
priest, the dark-robed tradition, the tonsured vision of an age and a
church that are passing.

"Do you understand French, monsieur?"

"A very little, monsieur."

"A very little is more than my English," he said, yet he politely went
the round of the pictures with them, and gave them the names of the
painters between his crossings at the different altars. At the high altar
there was a very fair Crucifixion; before this the priest bent one knee.
"Fine picture, fine altar, fine church," he said in English. At last they
stopped next the poor-box. As their coins clinked against those within,
he smiled serenely upon the good heretics. Then he bowed, and, as if he
had relapsed into the past, he vanished through the narrow door by which
he had entered.

Basil and Isabel stood speechless a moment on the church steps. Then she
cried,

"O, why didn't something happen?"

"Ah, my dear! what could have keen half so good as the nothing